So Close is a high-concept Hong Kong martial arts actioner whose main weakness is its mixed salad bowl nature. Its elements are disparate and incongruent. On the one hand, it's a wire-fu flick where the protagonists are blessed with superhuman fighting skills (even though they're supposedly not enhanced in any way). On the other hand, it's an oh-so-serious melodrama consisting of several relationships. It's also a cop cat-and-mouse movie utlizing multiple story threads involving made-up-for-the-movies computer technology and a large corporate building run by a crime organization.

And yet, this movie manages to be pretty entertaining, mainly due to the individual strengths of those very disparate elements. Its main draw -- three attractive women fight with guns and martial arts -- is employed with confidence and skill, both in style and execution. Director Cory Yuen (sometimes spelled "Corey"), who choreographed the action for many Jet Li flicks, mostly uses tried-and-true techniques here, but he pulls it all off with a fair amount of panache. Even though the girls' moves are exaggerated to a ridiculous extent, at least we can see those moves -- unlike the recent Hollywood trend of action editing which shows half-second close-ups of a foot here and an arm there, Yuen uses slow-mos, tracking, and angles to follow his combatants. The viewers are allowed to enjoy a sense of fluidity and an appreciation of the choreography. Imagine that.

The other major element involves the melodrama, which is a kind of de facto standard for these types of movies set by the John Woo school of Hong Kong cinema. In So Close, it's given a particularly fresh wrinkle for this genre -- instead of the usual rites of male bonding, here we experience the feminine side of the "crisis creates strange bedfellows" idea. The main storyline seems more or less a direct parallel to Woo's The Killer, but with Chow Yun-Fat's character being split into a pair of sisters played by Shu Qi and Zhao Wei (also known as Vicki Zhao). The bond between the two sisters, as well as the bond between one of them and the detective played by singer/actress Karen Mok, gives the movie its theme (and in case you didn't get that, it plays the Carpenters' "Close to You" about 10 times). As it turns out, this movie, filled with flying bullets, breaking glass, and devastating karate kicks, is really about sisterly loyalty and responsibility.

The action and melodrama don't really come together until a key event occurs just before the third act. So Close must be given credit for making a strong move at this point, because it noticeably gives the action some weight for the rest of the movie. Not only does it invest the climax with more suspense, it sets up for a scene that, when you think about it, really comes out of nowhere -- a swordfight. But it's a more brutal  swordfight than many I've seen lately, making it the perfect complement to the film's other main set piece, a somewhat playfully directed hand-to-hand contest between Shu and Mok halfway through the movie.

All this doesn't add up to a great movie, but it gets the job done. The film contains too many loose elements that demand a less serious treatment, in particular a group of movie cliches ranging from a reappearing lost love to the outside-the-system cop and her green partner to the heroines' tragic pasts that made them who they are today. But So Close, like its Hong Kong predecessors, takes its own story so seriously as a heroes-and-thieves tragedy that you, too, may find yourself believing these gorgeous women can defy gravity when they're not busy mending their relationships.

(Released by Columbia Pictures and rated "R" for pervasive violence and a sexual convesation.)

Review also posted at www.windowtothemovies.com.