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Aces Go Places III (最佳拍档之女皇密令)

Aces Go Places III: Our Man from Bond Street (最佳拍档之女皇密令) is a 1984 Hong Kong action comedy directed by Tsui Hark, the third installment of the Aces Go Places series produced by the Cinema City studio. It stars Sam Hui as the master thief King Kong and Karl Maka as the detective Albert Au, and it is a full-on James Bond spoof that takes the series abroad for the first time, with an action set piece on the Eiffel Tower and appearances by past Bond villains Odd Job and Jaws¹. Released at the 1984 Lunar New Year, it became the highest-grossing film of the franchise and the top Hong Kong film of that year¹^•².

Key fact	Detail
Chinese title	最佳拍档之女皇密令; also released internationally as Mad Mission 3: Our Man from Bond Street¹^•³
Director / writer	Tsui Hark; screenplay and production by Raymond Wong¹
Studio / release	Cinema City; Hong Kong release 26 January 1984⁴
Format	Colour, 35mm, Cantonese, 95 minutes¹
Principal cast	Sam Hui, Karl Maka, Sylvia Chang, Cyrus Wong Ka-ming, Richard Kiel, Neil Connery¹
Box office	HK$29,286,077, the number one Hong Kong film of 1984²
Franchise standing	Highest-grossing film of the five-film Aces Go Places series¹

Spoilers

Plot

King Kong, no longer a thief, is hired by a British secret agent to retrieve the Queen's crown jewels. After completing the job he realizes it was an elaborate setup by an international criminal organization, and he must work with his old partner Albert Au to stop the false "agent" from stealing the jewels¹. In the course of the story King Kong is also summoned by the Governor of Hong Kong to help recover the stolen stones⁷.

The spoof leans heavily on Bond iconography. The villainous agent is played by Neil Connery, Sean Connery's younger brother, and the cast includes Richard Kiel, who played Jaws in the James Bond films, alongside an Odd Job figure¹. American actor Peter Graves, known for Mission: Impossible, also appears⁶. The action highlights include a fight on the Eiffel Tower and a chase into the Hong Kong subway, and the film adds a new comic character, the detective's young son, whose kidnapping by the enemy raises the stakes¹^•⁷.

Production and context

The Aces Go Places series was the flagship comedy franchise of Cinema City, the studio founded by Raymond Wong, Dean Shek, and Karl Maka that dominated Hong Kong filmmaking in the 1980s⁵. The first film, directed by Eric Tsang in 1982, established the formula: Sam Hui as a suave jewel thief with high-tech gadgets, Maka as a bumbling detective, and Sylvia Chang as a police officer, in a series that was in many ways a James Bond parody⁵. Tsui Hark, who had appeared in a small role in the first film, took over the directing reins for the third installment¹^•⁵.

The film opened in Hong Kong on 26 January 1984, in the Lunar New Year holiday period that the series had made its own⁴^•¹. It was released internationally under the title Mad Mission 3: Our Man from Bond Street, one of the first four series entries retitled Mad Mission for foreign markets³^•⁶.

Box office and reception

The film grossed HK$29,286,077 in Hong Kong, ranking first among 1984 Hong Kong films and breaking the territory's box-office records at the time²^•⁸. It outgrossed every other entry in the series, ahead of the fourth film (about HK$27 million) and the first (about HK$26 million)¹^•⁹. In terms of admissions, however, the first film retained the series record for decades⁹.

Critical responses have varied. The Hong Kong Film Archive describes the film as a Lunar New Year hit with an exciting Eiffel Tower set piece and fresh, inventive plot and effects work¹. Producer Karl Maka credited Tsui Hark's approach: he abandoned the series formula and shot the film as if it were a 007 picture, and it succeeded both in Hong Kong and in overseas sales⁹. Reviewers elsewhere have been cooler, finding the Bond and Mission: Impossible parodies enjoyable but patchy, and one retrospective account notes that the stunt-work joy of the second film is partly lost to larger effects³^•⁵.

Legacy

The film is one of the three consecutive series entries, from 1982 to 1984, that each took the Hong Kong annual box-office championship¹⁰. Its story of a Hong Konger entrusted with recovering the British Crown Jewels has been read as touching on Hong Kong attitudes toward the British at a moment when the Sino-British negotiations over the territory's future were under way⁸. The film's storyboards were later shown in a Hong Kong Film Archive exhibition on Hong Kong cinema¹¹, and in 2025 Shout! Factory released the series on 4K UHD, including the international cut of this film under the Mad Mission Part 3 title¹².

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026