Considering what it is, Hit Girls has no business running as long as the 15 minutes it does. To all intents and purposes the short film is all about the style and cool action of John Woo, and modern martial arts films – it even adds cool points by having two female leads. The film opens with an action sequence which makes up the majority of the film and, for what this is, it is pretty good. The action perhaps does flow between edits as it should, and there are too many times you can see the whole sequence broken down into shots.
It is still quite enjoyable in terms of the physical work from Tran in particular, since she is also one of the writers and directors of the piece, and does a lot of the better fight moves. Unfortunately, while it produces some nice little moments, it is consistently a bit low rent; the fragmented feel to the action is part of that, but it is also the lack of budget relating to fire-arms and the like. The attempt at plot doesn't really come off, and the second half is not particularly good, and not helped by some poor performances. There are attempts to do some character things here (eg Charlie's moment of experiencing a different world of affection) but mostly it doesn't have much ambition apart from putting together the few action moments, and otherwise happy to copy other, better films, with the low resources it has available.
As a throwaway short, there is probably 5 good minutes in here, and some good work from Tran and Chan, however the remainder is where the work needed to be better and resources needed to be capable of doing more.
