SILVER HAWK (2004)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *fair*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *sociological*

In an online reference I can no longer find, I read the allegation that SILVER HAWK was based on an old Hong Kong superhero comics-character from the forties. I don't find this hard to believe, since in every way the superheroine seems like a new iteration of the trope of the wealthy parvenu who fights crime in a costumed identity. In this case, the motorcycle-riding Silver Hawk, guardian of "Polaris City" (which is to Hong Kong as Gotham City was to New York) is also famed magazine model Lulu Wong.

This film was something of a return to form for Michelle Yeoh, having also played a high-kicking superheroine about ten years previous in the two HEROIC TRIO films. She has to spend a lot of time leaping around kicking bad-guy butt while smiling insouciantly, and she does both quite well. Though she fights some generalized crooks, her main opponent is American businessman Alexander Wolf (Luke Goss), who wants to steal the chip technology of a Hong Kong scientist, with which Wolf plans to control people's minds. Wolf has a small army of henchmen and two major, colorfully-garbed enforcers, played by Michael Jai White and Bingbing Li, and Silver Hawk burns up a lot of time in big splashy battles with this duo before a climactic battle with their bionically enhanced boss.

Lulu Wong never voices an explicit motive for battling crime in a costume, but one presumes that she formed the urge to fight evil while training in a martial arts academy as a child. In Lulu's flashbacks to this period, we see how she forged a deep friendship with a young male student, her "first love" as it were. She meets his twenty-something self early in the film, now calling himself by the punny name of "Rich Man" (Richie Jen), and guess what? He's the new head of the Polaris police department, and he's sworn to apprehend the vigilante Silver Hawk. The script plays the conflict between Rich and his quarry for broad comedy, with Rich being the butt of the joke as against the far more skilled lady superhero. Late in the film he finds out who she is, and the film turns slightly more serious as he's conflicted between personal feelings and official duties. Not surprisingly, he ends up allying himself with the vigilante to stop Wolf, and the film ends with a very light suggestion of budding romance.

The conflict between cop and vigilante is the film's primary sociological myth, but there's no sense of any opposition to Silver Hawk fighting crime because she's female: "girl power" has already won its war in this movie. There's also a dollop of kung-fu wisdom in some of the flashback scenes, but nothing exceptional. The big fight-scenes are well done though a trifle mechanical, so the comedic interaction of Rich and Lulu proves SILVER HAWK's most enjoyable asset.