Here's another mind-boggling Cynthia Rothrock movie, but in a good way this time. Magic Crystal is a 1986 action fantasy movie directed by Jing Wong (known for City Hunter and Future Cops). The film actually stars Andy Lau and has a predominantly Asian cast aside from Richard Norton, but Cynthia Rothrock is a supporting actress and engages in combat throughout a good portion of the movie, so even if she's secondary she's probably one of the main attractions.
The plot is as disjointed and extravagant as many other fantasy Asian movies from the time, focusing on the search for a magic crystal that must be protected by mercenary Andy Lo, but the object falls into the hands of his little nephew, Pin-pin, who becomes friends with the entity that's inside it. Meanwhile, two Interpol agents, Cindy Morgan (Cynthia Rothrock) and her partner (Siu Chung Mok), join Andy to fight against the KGB members who are also after the crystal.
It's always amazing to realize how imaginative and outlandish Hong Kong movies can be, we already featured a little bit of it but there's a new level of bizarreness going on in this picture. The kid humor is abundant (and it's charmingly silly), some fights begin out of nowhere, everyone knows kung-fu, there are irrelevant deviations from the main storyline every now and then, and there's a new crazy and unsuspected plot point every 5 minutes or so. Magic Crystal keeps things fresh and never lets the rhythm and pacing go down, constantly stimulating the audience.
Apparently, director Jing Wong would mostly work with his actors in very ambiguous ways, he would tell them to look up but he wouldn't tell them what they are looking at to guide their performance, this actually works out well because every actor seems very casual about the deranged events and things that are going on around them, adding to the surreality of the picture and never falling into self-aware pitfalls that could have turned it obnoxious like "crazy" movies from today do.
As I said before, Cynthia isn't really the main character here and she doesn't do the heavy lifting when it comes to performance and plot development but the movie goes to so many places that nobody is really the focus here. She performs some amazing moves and executes her stunts quite well, using different fighting styles like the Eagle Claw and the Northern Praying Mantis. Another highlight is her use of weapons like swords and a spear early on.
Asian actress Wei-Wei Huang plays Chan's sister and is a surprising action lady who basically becomes a proficient martial artist midway through the picture. Just another surprise in the box of twists this movie is. Wei teams up with Rothrock's character to battle the almost unstoppable villain played by martial artist Richard Norton. In fact, after the midway point Rothrock becomes a more prominent character and the action unfolds more consistently up until the very end.
Supposedly, Cynthia hurt a ligament before shooting and during the shoot, not only that, but also scarred Richard Norton while doing a choreography with weapons, the same thing happened to her opponent when shooting the spear fight. So you could say that this is one of the toughest shoots for one of these movies, contrasting that with Yes Madam's relatively safer shoot makes you think that Magic Crystal was specifically down and dirty (as most of these films are).
Cynthia and Norton would then go on to star in a great variety of movies together and their fight scenes would often stand out since both knew each other well and wouldn't hold back when performing their fights. You can tell by watching this incredible flick.
There's one weird moment (among many others) that stood out to me. There's a scene where Andy is properly introduced to Cynthia Rothrock's character and he says he knows her as "the policewoman who prefers kung-fu to guns." This is a very strange thing to say, considering that her character was never properly introduced and there was never a scene that actually presented what he mentioned other than an average fight scene at the beginning. So there's either a pivotal scene missing from the movie or Rothrock's fame as an action lady in films was something they felt should acknowledge.
The film was a hit overseas and introduced Rothrock to Philippine audiences. It's kind of an important film in Rothrock's career because it cemented her outside of just Hong Kong audiences, showed off more of her skills than what we have seen before, and introduced Norton to her filmography, kickstarting the iconic cinematic action B-movie duo.
Check it out, if anything just for the Rothrock fights.
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