The
Hippocratic Oath is about to get a serious workout and the surgical scalpel
will become a lethal martial arts weapon. She is truly a doctor who fights for
her patients, but there is a special reason for her ferocity in Roseanne Liang’s
Do No Harm (trailer here), by far the best
film in the Midnight Shorts Program at the 2017 Sundance Film Festival.
In
a private Hongjing hospital, the unnamed doctor is quietly stitching up a
gangster, until a rival gang rudely interrupts. They nearly massacre the entire
surgical team, but the doctor is tough to kill. Her patient is probably just a
bad a thug or maybe even worse, but she will protect him no matter what,
racking up a gosh darned impressive body count of her own.
Harm is a
super-charged, ultra-gritty action movie in the tradition of hospital shoot ‘em
ups like John Woo’s Hard Boiled and
Johnnie To’s Three, but Liang
averages considerably more mayhem per minute. As the doctor, Marsha Yuen instantly
establishes herself as an action figure, but also has sufficient gravitas to be
a trusted medical profession. If you were going under the knife, you would want
her to be the one in charge of the operation.