Operation Pink Squad II

With a title like Operation Pink Squad 2, I was fully expecting a Hong Kong 'girls and guns' flick, with a bevy of kung fu cuties kicking ass and engaging in high-octane shootouts. What I actually got was a broad farce/madcap supernatural comedy in which the 'pink squad'—four pretty female police officers—go undercover to catch a criminal but wind up coming face-to-face with malevolent ghosts. Only with the help of a Taoist priest can they hope to survive the night.

How much you enjoy the film will depend on just how funny you find Asian comedy. I have always struggled with the Chinese sense of humour, meaning that much of this very silly film left me distinctly unimpressed. The opening marital nonsense, the cross-dressing police officer, and the endless chase scenes featuring a ghostly flying head all failed to make me laugh.

Towards the end of the film, director Jeffrey Lau cranks up the craziness with an out of left field scene involving remote control helicopters, a pissing contest to see who will be castrated, self-detonation by the ghost head, and the arrival of a group of supernatural 'protectors', two of whom are women with beards. All of this is mildly amusing, but not enough to prevent the film as a whole from being rather tiresome.