Mad Mission V (Aces Go Places V: The Terracotta Hit) - B
By Kage Alan

After a three-year absence, King Kong and Kodajak are back in action. Was it worth the wait? Actually, yes. After a botched kidnapping to return a girl to her elderly husband-to-be, the partners decide to part ways. Each figures the other is bad luck, so King Kong changes his name and starts a highly unsuccessful investment business while Kodajak makes his living fishing or some such thing.

When master thief White Glove manages to get his mittens on the Terre-Cotta Army, it’s really only so he can possess the Excalibur sword hidden in one of the statues. No sooner does he wield the weapon for the first time that it’s stolen right out of his hands by two people disguised as the Aces partners. Brother and sister thieves make off with the sword and King Kong and Kodajak are framed. In order to recover the sword, the government brings in Chinese Rambo to find the Aces, only they don’t take too kindly to being set up.

With White Glove, the mob and the police hot on their trail, King Kong and Kodajak must team up once more to locate the real thieves and recover the Terra-Cotta army or face imprisonment and execution. While “Mad Mission IV” pretty much killed the freshness of the series, there is a great deal more humor and action injected in this film and director Chia-Liang Liu keeps things moving at a speedy pace. If this is the last we’ll see of the Aces team, then they went out in style.