Hong fen bing tuan

This is the nearest you'll find to a female Magnificent Seven (and Dirty Dozen, come to that). The direction and camera-work are OK but nothing special, and the story makes about as much sense as in those other films. I watched a dubbed version and the dialogue was pretty good. The brilliant Morricone score is no doubt pirated, but it's very well used. What's greatest here though is the well-acted characters. The women involved each get a separate and fun cameo intro, and their names, personalities and appearance are all distinct - not always the case in dubbed Chinese films.

The action scenes are not the greatest (and some of the shoot-outs are as silly as they are in James Bond films etc.) but they're competently done, varied, and always fun. I got as involved with this as with original-version M7 (and more than I ever did with D12) and I was as sad when one of these characters died, as I was with Coburn or Vaughan in M7.

2020 wasn't a great year for lots of reasons. One for me was I didn't see a whole lot of good movies. On the action side, it was mostly endless high-cost-CGI Avengers same-old and the like. This is the best I watched in the action genre, highly recommended, 90 minutes of fun entertainment.