With its conveniently naïve attitude toward technology — and some cheerfully crappy CGI work — So Close is being billed by Columbia Pictures as a sort of Asian answer to its own Charlie's Angels franchise, which does the film a disservice. Despite its implausibility, the story has more going for it than the condescending character sketches and purportedly femme-empowering tits-and-ass regime that got the McG pictures from set piece to set piece.

Two of the three women here — Zhao Wei from the terrific Shaolin Soccer and Shu Qi from The Transporter — are gun-for-hire siblings capitalizing on a technology that allows them, among other things, to crack computer networks and freely manipulate the imagery they display. The third, Karen Mok, is the formidable policewoman on their trail. It takes a while, but by the final reels, the cop finds herself on the same page as the mercenaries, fighting against a common enemy — the devious bosses who attempt to rub the duo out after their most recent hit.

Director Cory Yuen's strategy is to make generous use of computer-generated tricks (let's just say this film has a lot of shattering glass) to supplement terrific performances and the kind of old-school action sequences that Hong Kong filmmakers execute so gracefully. (A good Hong Kong action film feels like a dance performance; the admittedly spectacular Hollywood equivalent plays like a football game.) The mid-air balletics are here, as are the Woovian stand-offs where antagonists express their differences by leveling handguns at one another simultaneously. It's a cool-looking film, part of the feedback loop created when The Matrix, which co-opted Hong Kong filmmaking styles, began to influence Asian cinema itself — the impossibly tall office building that towers over the rest of the Hong Kong skyline is a vertiginously slick creation.

What further separates So Close from its American equivalent is its attention to character relationships. While the screenplay is not especially sophisticated by Hollywood standards, it does attempt to attach some personal heft to the narrative. The sisters have a backstory that complicates their actions, and Zhao's relationship with Mok has the whiff of same-sex romance. Most notably, there's an unexpectedly affecting scene set in a cemetery that deals with the same 21st century affliction that Wim Wenders considered in Until the End of the World — the substitution of technological icons for real people and the displacement of internal memory traces by the ubiquity of home video.