When I hear Cynthia Rothrock’s name, I immediately picture her hanging off scaffolding in what appears to be a mall’s parking garage, throwing punches & kicks at fellow martial artist Karen Sheperd, who attacks her with sharpened, weaponized jewelry.  I’ve seen that clip shared hundreds of times out of times out of context on social media, so it was amusing to learn that there isn’t really much additional context to speak of.  Sheperd’s assassin character is only in the movie Righting Wrongs for those few minutes, and Rothrock spends most of the runtime chasing & fighting the film’s hero, played by Yuen Biao.  The Vinegar Syndrome release of the film includes a 1990s Golden Harvest “documentary” that’s basically just a highlight reel of the action cinema studio’s best fights, titled The Best of the Martial Arts Films.  Seemingly half of the fights from that docu-advertisement are pulled from Righting Wrongs (billed as Above the Law), including the entirety of the Rothrock-Sheperd showdown.  That’s because every fight sequence in the movie rules, and they each stand on their own as individual art pieces outside their duty to the plot.  They’re so incredible, in fact, that you can know & respect the name “Cynthia Rothrock” just from seeing those clips in isolation, without having ever seen a full Cynthia Rothrock film.

Rothrock stars in Righting Wrongs as a kickass, righteous cop, and yet the movie ultimately makes it clear that it hates all cops — the perfect formula for an action film.  Yuen Biao headlines as a prosecutor who’s frustrated with his job’s inability to bring high-end criminals to justice, so he becomes a murderous vigilante.  Rothrock’s colonialist cop fights to stop him, essentially fighting against justice by doing her job as the white-lady enforcer of British rule over Hong Kong.  Everyone at the police station refers to her as “Madam,” which means that the title of her previous film Yes, Madam! is repeated constantly in-dialogue.  This one is just as great as that debut outing, both directed by Cory Yuen.  They have the same spectacular martial artistry and the same grim worldview – ending on a bleak, defeatist note where the corrupt Bad Guys higher up the food chain always win (as long as you watch the Hong Kong cuts of Righting Wrongs, anyway; the extended international versions shoehorn in an ending where the Good Guys improbably prevail).  The only difference, really, is whether you’re more in the mood to watch Rothrock fight alongside Yuen Biao or alongside Michelle Yeoh, to which there are no wrong answers, only right ones.

For all of its thematic preoccupations with The Justice System’s inability to enact true justice (or to protect children from being stabbed & exploded, which happens onscreen more than you might expect), Righting Wrongs is mostly an excuse to stage cool, elaborate fight sequences, almost as much so as the Best of the Martial Arts Films infomercial.  Yuen Biao puts in some incredible, death-defying stunts here, which should be no surprise to anyone familiar with his background as one of the Seven Little Fortunes, alongside his “brothers” Jackie Chan & Sammo Hung.  After winning a fistfight against a half-dozen speeding cars in a parking garage, he later hangs from a rope trailing from a small airplane.  It’s exhilarating but worrying.  He also risks severe injury in a scene where Rothrock attempts to handcuff him in arrest on an apartment balcony, so he moves the fight to the flimsy railing in evasion.  Rothrock also makes skillful use of those handcuffs in a scene where she arrests several gangsters in a mahjong parlor, pulling them from a leather garter under her skirt to cuff them all to a chair with a single pair.  Still, her highlight fight is the standalone showdown with Karen Sheperd, which has somewhat overshadowed the rest of the film’s legacy online. It’s one great fight among many, a spoil of riches you can only find in Golden Age Hong Kong action cinema.

-Brandon Ledet