Brave Young Girls (1990)

Three young women from poor backgrounds end up under the thumb of a scumbag, pressured to work as prostitutes. A Japanese cop looking to take down an international drugs gang asks the girls to help her find evidence, and they see an opportunity to get some justice.

BRAVE YOUNG GIRLS is surprisingly richly plotted for a film that is, when all is said and done, scumbag gangsters do bad things until Yukari Oshima turns up to kick the snot out of them. Perhaps that's why Yukari doesn't make her first appearance until the film is half way over, and then is only seen briefly before crashing back in for the requisite action finale. Well, more likely she was only contracted for a few days and they had to fill the rest of the film with something - but it's nice that they bothered to make it an actual story.

It's still not exactly a profound look at the stark choices facing young women from poor backgrounds in a society with a weak social safety net, but it does dig a bit deeper into the sociological problems that allow crime to flourish - i.e. the very things that right-wing politicians who advertise themselves as tough on crime always refuse to address.

I don't want to overplay the depths of the script, when all is said and done this is still a pretty basic low budget HK movie built around the requirement to open and close with a big fight, but the fact that somebody put some thought into what happens in between is appreciated.