Fight Night: Michelle Yeoh and Cynthia Rothrock Exploded Into Film in Yes, Madam!
Conflict is the most basic building block of story, and a fight is the most simple conflict there is: Two people come to blows, and one must triumph over the other. Fight Night is a regular column in which Ken Lowe revisits some of cinema history’s most momentous, spectacular, and inventive fight scenes, from the brutally simple to the devilishly intricate. Check back here for more entries.
Any movie that lands with a bang is going to inspire some pale imitators—for every The Ring, you’re going to get a The Grudge. To kick off a whole new sub-genre—one that lasts more than a couple short years—is a real achievement, though. It speaks to a movie finding some unscratched itch in the movie-going public, oftentimes totally inadvertently. Of course, it doesn’t hurt if the movie in question features the debut of not one, but two giants of the industry.
In this regard, Corey Yuen’s 1985 action flick Yes, Madam! is downright historic, featuring the debuts of Cynthia Rothrock (literally named the Queen of Martial Arts), and actual superhuman Michelle Yeoh. It is a movie that spawned the gleefully insane “girls with guns” action subgenre in Hong Kong and shattered the glass ceiling for women-led action flicks (and numerous glass doors, windows, tables, interior art installations…). It’s a film that features Yeoh and Rothrock, neither of whom had ever headlined an action movie before, simply mowing down busloads of fools while destroying set dressing and taking stunt falls that couldn’t possibly have been painless, all while looking sharp as a Patrick Nagel painting.
It also ends with a marathon of a final battle, pitting Rothrock and Yeoh separately against first a mob of mooks, and then two opponents on a lavish, deadly set in a balletic bout with rip-roaring stunts. To watch Yes, Madam! is to understand immediately how this seemingly out-of-nowhere subgenre exploded onto the scene like the Kool-Aid Man.
Much as with our look back at The Way of the Dragon, the draw here is entirely due to our stars. And just as with Chuck Norris in that movie, part of that draw is getting to see the debut of someone who has gone on to deliver roundhouse kicks for decades. Before Yes, Madam!, Rothrock and Yeoh were just a humble multiple-black-belt holder and Miss Malaysia winner, respectively. Afterward, they were crowned as straight up action heroes, and neither has budged from the throne since.
The Film
Inspector Ng (Michelle Yeoh) is one of Hong Kong’s top cops, introduced foiling a daylight robbery while dressed to the nines. When one of her associates is murdered by a criminal syndicate, the piece of evidence the killer sought is snatched up by a pair of bumbling petty thieves by mistake. Ng is joined by a U.K. investigator, Inspector Morris (Cynthia Rothrock), introduced with a fight scene that is short but immediately establishes her as a limber and acrobatic ass-kicker. One martial arts instructor of mine likened the differences between Tae Kwon Do and Hap Ki Do as like the differences between straight lines and circles. If Yeoh’s balletic movements are more flowing and curved, Rothrock’s strikes and poses are all sharp, brutal straight lines.
A lot of the film is dedicated to the bumbling of the small-time crooks (including some brief scenes where Yeoh patron Sammo Hung and fellow grand man of Hong Kong movies Tsui Hark mug for the camera). Ng and Morris discover they’re after a syndicate boss (Dick Wei) and his unhinged enforcer Mad Dog (Fat Chung). It can feel like a long trek to get to the final confrontation due to all the physical comedy of the small-time crooks. Although these parts also feature some swift stunt work in places, nothing compares to when the movie lets Yeoh and Rothrock go to town. There’s some initial personality conflict between the two, but it’s fully put to bed by the end, when the pair share an iconic low five with each other before snapping into their Come Get Some poses and wrecking house.
It is important to note that in addition to this being Rothrock’s action movie debut, Michelle Yeoh had never before done her own stunts, nor headlined an action film. And yet, both come off like seasoned pros. In Rothrock’s case, with her years of martial arts and weapons training, it’s not a surprise. Yeoh, meanwhile, reportedly trained off-camera for hours a day in order to live up to Yuen’s truly demanding fight scenes.
Yeoh and Rothrock dive over, roll under, and leap through enemy swords and bullets, sending opponents flying through set features or tumbling into second story falls. Yuen—who before his death in 2022 had worked with everybody from Hiroyuki Sanada to Jason Statham—plans every scene for maximum destruction. Eventually, though, it’s down to just Rothrock vs. Wei and Yeoh vs. Chung on a multi-level set.
The Fight
You can argue this is actually two distinct fights, of course: Ng vs. Mad Dog on the top level of the atrium and Morris vs. Dick down below. Unfortunately, there aren’t any opportunities for Yuen to choreograph both pairs of belligerents throwing down in the same frame. It’s the only mark against this fight, which positions its two female leads as the deadly equals of their male antagonists.
Up top, Yeoh is taunted by her opponent, who purposefully puts his knife away out of disrespect. By the end of a fight that sees Yeoh gyrating around set features and kicking off of walls, her enemy decides he needs that knife after all, and she compensates by beating the daylights out of him with a block of wood. Yeoh scores an insane stage fatality to end her part of the fight, sending Mad Dog crashing through a glass art installation in the atrium’s water feature (what evil lair is complete without both of these things?). Yuen lingers on Mad Dog, the pool filling with his blood as his glass-shredded body floats to the top.
Rothrock, meanwhile, tangles with Wei down on the lower floor in a seesaw fight that has both trading some monstrous blows. Where Michelle Yeoh excels at dancing around a set, Rothrock just has sharp form in a straight-up fight. Yeoh joins her and the two fight Wei until they have him dead to rights at the edge of two sword blades.
The ending of Yes, Madam! is one for the ages. The microfilm that is the movie’s central McGuffin is destroyed, Ng and Morris have nothing on Wei’s dastardly crime boss, and the cops show up to haul the good guys away. At the last possible second, one of the bumbling small-time crooks, Strepsil (they’re all named after over-the-counter drugs), grabs a gun and starts blasting Wei. We freeze frame and the credits start rolling mid-squib. Presumably Ng and Morris are going away for life! It’s completely bonkers.
But then, so is everything about this one. The fight choreography in Yes, Madam! outside of this final bout is just as utterly wild. At one point, Yeoh sits on a banister that tops a glass paneled set of guardrails, leaning back to avoid strikes from two attackers. Gripping the banister with her knees, she rolls backward, rotating all the way around it to purposefully shatter through the glass paneling with her head so that she can then grab the bad guys by their legs and yank them off their feet. It took me two long sentences to describe something that happens in maybe three seconds on screen, because it’s such an unorthodox and instantly iconic move.
All this spectacle was reportedly brutal on all involved. The airport scene that introduces Rothrock’s character took three separate shoots to get in the can, all during ungodly hours in the interest of avoiding any disruption to airport operations. The final setpiece leading into the last 2-on-2 fight scene took an unbelievable 30 days to shoot. An on-set injury sidelined Rothrock for a while—Wei accidentally inflicted a head wound on her, necessitating a reshoot. Yuen was reportedly careful to use a stand-in for Wei, who was afraid Rothrock might be itching for some payback.
It’s hard to argue with the result, though. Yes, Madam! isn’t going to win any awards for production value or writing, but there’s no question, watching these fight scenes, that the actors are pulling off wild feats of strength and athleticism. It’s simply riveting to watch.
The Fallout
With Yes, Madam!, the “girls with guns” subgenre was born. Yuen would go on to make movies like She Shoots Straight, and other directors cranked out movies like Killer Angels, Madam City Hunter, The Heroic Trio, and Angel Terminators and its sequel. Hong Kong raced to cast more high-kicking lady action heroes in movies that feature brutal brawls and tons of blanks. It was a new turn for Hong Kong action through the late ’80s and early ’90s, part of the last hurrah of movies that featured completely practical effects. It also contains the early DNA of more modern lady-led actioners like Anna, Atomic Blonde, Kate, and even the guns-and-kicks martial arts fusion films like John Wick and the forthcoming Ballerina.
But Yes, Madam! also gave birth to the careers of Cynthia Rothrock and Michelle Yeoh, who both continue to rinse thugs 40 years later. After a run of badass crowd pleaser movies in Hong Kong and a decades-long career dominating in and promoting martial arts, Rothrock remains active in genre fare, including a kung fu fighting Western she wrote, directed, and starred in just last year. There is also precisely zero chance that Rothrock didn’t somehow inspire the look and feel of original Mortal Kombat character Sonya Blade.
Yeoh, meanwhile, is likely to go down in history alongside the likes of Buster Keaton and co-star Jackie Chan among the most prolific and multi-talented performers in cinema history. To list her accomplishments, her costars, and examples of her range is to risk slighting her by forgetting something. Her headlining of Everything Everywhere All At Once in 2022 was celebrated among action aficionados in much the same way as the triumphant return of a conquering queen.
Hong Kong cinema has always been a leader in action—there’s an argument to be made that any strides Hollywood has made in the past 25 years at bringing clean, competent action to the screen is due to directors who were inspired by Asian film. Yes, Madam! is certainly rough, but it’s another example of why people all over the world respond so enthusiastically to what Hong Kong has on offer.
Join us next month for a triptych told in haymakers and knockdowns, as Fight Night revisits Raging Bull.
Kenneth Lowe will complete your training, and with our combined strength, we can end this destructive conflict and bring order to the galaxy! You can follow him on Bluesky @illusiveken.bsky.social. To support his fiction, join his Patreon.