Hollywood’s idea of a *new* action movie is to dust off Bruce Willis and film yet another Die Hard episode. . .but in Asia, they reinvent the genre every 4 or 5 years. Yo Yo Girl Cop is not a cinematic masterpiece. . .except by the standard of stale Amerikan cultural retreads. I had the great misfortune to be given a free pass to a showing of a terrible Amerikan movie titled The Bourne Ultimatum, a preposterously unbelievable *film* which must have been shot by a half-dozen cameramen, all of whom were suffering from an advanced stage of Parkinson’s Disease. . .This hyper-shaky exercise in action-for-the-sake-of-action, whose warp-speed Muhammad Ali-like jitters are only interrupted very infrequently to capture an image of *star* Matt Damon looking puzzled or pouty, or co-*star* Julia Stiles looking like she’s about to burst into tears for no apparent reason, takes Hollywood to a new low in the lost art of storytelling. The stupidity of the CIA villains Damon battles in this wretched nonsense must only be matched by the stupidity of the 12000+ morons who voted this thing one of the Greatest Movies of All-Time on imdb.com.
The Bourne Ultimatum isn’t cinema, it’s NASCAR. . .it’s a motion blur, a whirlwind of cartoon violence blowing a cloud of invisibility over the uncountable plot holes. What little story there is to this nonsense concerns the o-woe-is-me super assassin *Jason Bourne,* apparently the creation of some CIA mind control wizard, as he kills and maims the dozens who stand in his way on his frenetic search to discover his true identity. . .the Eternal Question, *Who am I?,* has never seemed so meaningless.
After watching the abomination that The Bourne Ultimatum is, Yo Yo Girl Cop seemed like that silver screen pearl of great value, a movie for which the viewer would sell one hundred The Bourne Ultimatums to obtain. Why, Yo Yo Girl Cop’s crazy plot (about a teen Jap girl who is deported back to Japan after her mother, a former Jap Special Agent, is arrested in New York, and who then, to have the Jap government intervene with the Amerikan government to get her mother freed, must herself become a Special Agent and infiltrate a high school to learn who is behind the ominous web site Enola Gay, and what mischief Enola Gay intends to wreak on the school after their web site countdown clock zeroes out in 72 hours) seems as airtight as Kubrick’s The Killing.
Whereas in The Bourne Ultimatum you have metrosexual male actors prancing around in pretend fist fights and gun battles, Yo Yo Girl Cop features a cast of pretty young J-pop girls in those cute Japanese school uniforms battling it out with their weaponized steel yo-yos. . .and the movie even has a subplot, about classroom bullying, which makes this thing, compared to contemporary Hollywood, seem as intricately layered as The Godfather: Part III.
There are also moments of humor (sorely sorely lacking in the dour Bourne saga), such as the inventive, compared to Bourne, chase scene in which a suicide-belt clad four-eyed Jap who looks like the long lost son of Jerry Lewis’ Nutty Professor flees from Yo Yo Cop Girl, and his subsequent giggling, wild-four-eyed explanation to the police for his motive in joining Enola Gay.
Yo Yo Girl Cop is a lightweight, for sure, but its fresh, youthful take on the action genre make it seem like her hero, the Yo Yo Girl Cop, could run rings around Jason Bourne, and then knock him dead with a blow to his head from her steel yo-yo. ***
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