The Heroic Trio (1993)
Chinese Title: 東方三俠
Translation: The Three Heroes of the East
Starring:
Anita Mui Yim-Fong, Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung Man-Yuk, Damian Lau Chung-Yan,
Anthony Wong Chau-Sang, James Pax, Mimi Chu Mai-Mai, Yen Shi-Kwan, Paul Chun
Pui
Director:
Johnnie To, Tony Ching Siu-Tung
Action Director: Tony Ching Siu-Tung
Is there a name for the following
phenomena? Back in the day, people might make mix tapes of songs they tape off
the radio (or from other tapes, if their stereos had two tape decks). Or in the
late 90s and early 00s, they would download random songs they liked from
file-sharing sites like Napster and then burn them onto a CD. I’m guessing that
with today, it’s done with HOURS worth of music on a flash memory stick, if not
directly on the smart phone. In any case, with tapes and CDs, you often
listened to things in the order they were recorded—you could shuffle it up on a
CD, but why bother?
The thing is, with time, you mind would
get used to the order of the songs on that tape or CD. And finally, you would
come to associate one unrelated song with another, even years later. That’s how
it is with me. One mix CD that my friend Huy recorded for me back in 2000 had a
mixture of Chinese movie tunes and mainstream Occidental music on it. As a
result, to this very day, I cannot listen to “Bohemian Rhapsody” by Queen
without expecting Anita Mui’s award-winning theme song from The Heroic Trio,
“Don’t Ask About Life”, to start playing immediately after. It doesn’t matter
the context: karaoke, radio, random Youtube suggestion…as soon as I heard “Nothing
really matters to me,” my mind starts to expect that the next thing that I’ll
hear is “Sui wor sui wor sui chi kan, sheung sik kit hap liu wan nan.”
It is, to me, one of the most memorable movie
tunes in all of HK cinema, ranking up there with “Naam yi dong ji keung” from Once
Upon a Time in China and “Because of You” by Cass Phang from Peace Hotel.
But that’s just me.
The movie opens with a policeman,
Detective Lau (Damian Lau, of Duel to the Death and Holy Weapon)
and his wife, Tung (Anita Mui, advertised on the Tai Seng VHS as “The Madonna
of Asia”), doing checking out a run-down house in the boondocks of some Chinese
City. If Egon Spengler were there, he’d probably say, “I think this building
should be condemned. There's serious metal fatigue in all the load-bearing
members, the wiring is substandard, [and] it's completely inadequate for our
power needs…” However, Tung thinks the place has character and convinces her hubby
that the place has “character” and they purchase the house, much to the
surprise of the realtor.
It’s probably a good thing that the Lau family doesn’t have children yet, and that Tung herself is so willing to put in the effort to fix the place up, because Detective Lau has a lot on his place at work. For the past few months, babies have been disappearing all over the city, usually from maternity wards. No clues have been found at the site of the kidnappings, no terrorist organization has assumed responsibility for the crimes, nor have any of the families received any ransom notes. The authorities are completely in the dark as to what’s going on. Things really get intense when an invisible force shows up at the police station and informs the Chief (Paul Chun Pui, of Pantyhose Hero and Ameera) that his newborn son is next.
That’s enough to get most of the police force at the hospital. After all, if the culprit is so arrogant as to let the entire police department know where they’ll strike next, then maybe they are getting arrogant enough to let themselves get caught. That still doesn’t prepare them for what happens that evening. While the Chief’s wife (Chui To) is looking at her baby from the window in the nursery, it’s to her and the nurses’ horror that two babies—including her own—simply rise up to the air and fly through the window. The police gather on the outside to observe the floating babies, completely baffled at what’s happening in front of them. Suddenly, the city’s protector, Wonder Woman (aka Tung), arrives on the scene via running across the power lines to see what the commotion is about. She figures out that an invisible person is involved, as is able to wound them with one of her Batarang-esque darts. But one of the babies is the decoy and the invisible thief drops said baby, forcing Wonder Woman to rescue the falling baby while the thief gets away with the other child.
We learn that the invisible person is actually an Invisible Woman named Ching (Michelle Yeoh, billed on the VHS as “Asia’s Top Action Actress”). Ching is in the “employ” of a powerful Eunuch-sorcerer (Yen Shi-Kwan, of Dance of the Drunk Mantis and The Royal Tramp 2) who lives a strange netherworld beneath The City. His plan is to kidnap a bunch of babies with a special birthday and then, at the next Auspicious Day, choose one to become the next Emperor of China. I’m assuming said Emperor would raise up an army capable of smashing the CCP and start up a new (supernatural) dynasty. There you go.
The next variable in the mix is a mercenary named Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung, advertised on the VHS as “Former Miss Hong Kong”). After displaying her skills by capturing a bunch of robbers holding the employees of a chemical factory hostage, she makes a deal with the Chief to find his son in exchange for half a million in gold bullion. To that end, she herself stages a kidnapping at the hospital in order to ferret out the real culprit. Although that ultimately works, it also gets the attention of Wonder Woman. The ensuing fight between the three women at another condemned building tragically results in the death of the decoy baby. However, Thief Catcher learns of the kidnapper’s identity, at which point we learn that she herself used to be in the employ of the Eunuch before escaping and going to business for herself.
There is a lot going in this film, as I haven’t mentioned the subplot involving Ching’s boyfriend (James Pax, the thunder god from Big Trouble in Little China), who is the scientist that invented the invisible robe. That particular subplot contributes a lot to Ching’s eventual change of heart in the third act before she joins forces with Thief Catcher and Wonder Woman to stop the Eunuch. Each of the three is given a character arc, although Wonder Woman probably undergoes the least amount of development because she’s already a righteous do-gooder. Thief Catcher has to make amends for the death of the baby and overcome her own materialism, while Ching is a villainess until her employment and love life come into violent conflict with each other. It’s a testament to Johnnie To’s skill that he’s able to keep it all together, especially in the drama department, despite having so much to keep track of, while never skimping on the action, either.
It helps that action director Ching Siu-Tung is such a pro at this sort of everything-goes narrative. As Scott Hamilton and Chris Holland of StompTokyo said in their review of A Chinese Ghost Story: “This kind of scattershot approach to movie making could be confusing, or tiring, or even worse, boring, but Ching Siu-Tung's amazing visual style holds the whole film together.” In the case of The Heroic Trio, it’s a combination of Ching’s imaginative action direction and the slick photography. Credit to the latter goes to cinematographers Poon Hang-sang (Peking Opera Blues) and Tom Lau (A Chinese Ghost Story), both of whom had worked with Ching before. Bruce Yu’s art direction is also distinctive, reminding one of A Chinese Ghost Story in the Netherworld scenes and Disney’s live-action Dick Tracy for the interior sets.
The action itself is a synthesis of everything that Ching Siu-Tung had been doing in cinema up to that point. By 1993, Ching had established himself alongside Yuen Woo-Ping as the king of wire-fu. In fact, his films were even more divorced from the laws of physics as we know them that Sifu Yuen’s efforts were. In addition to the complex wire stunts, we also get frequent bursts of balletic swordplay (see Butterfly and Sword and Dragon Inn); stylish gunplay (á la A Better Tomorrow 2); supernatural attacks (see The Swordsman trilogy); and even a brief stop motion sequence (see A Chinese Ghost Story). There is even some bullet time thrown in for good measure, which had gotten a lot of attention the year before in Full Contact. Of the seven film that Ching Siu-Tung contributed to in 1993, it was this one that got nominated for a Best Action Choreography Award, but lost to Corey Yuen’s Fong Sai Yuk.
Most of the individual action sequences aren’t especially long, but they are always fun to watch with some memorable visual at the end of each one. Whether it’s Wonder Woman running across power lines; the Eunuch’s enforcer (Anthony Wong, of Untold Story and Ebola Syndrome) killing hostages with a flying guillotine; or Maggie Cheung throwing dynamite sticks into oil drums and riding them through the air; or a fight with a stop-motion skeleton (á la The Terminator) there’s always something nutty going on in this movie. There isn’t much in terms of sustained martial arts: Michelle Yeoh has a brief exchange of punches and kicks with Anthony Wong and wields a mean chain whip throughout. Don’t go into this expecting a kung fu movie, it’s a superhero fantasy with some martial arts in it.
Finally, a note about releases. There are two main ones in the US that I’m aware of: the Tai Seng release and the Miramax one. The Tai Seng release is the full version, as far as I’m concerned. The Miramax cut, which, incidentally, is also the one that came to Brazil, has several scenes missing that would undoubtedly offend anyone not well-versed in Hong Kong filmmaking tropes. You see, in the West, there’s something of an unwritten rule about not killing children or putting them in danger in action movies. If you look at Leonard Maltin’s takes on films like Double Team and The Long Kiss Goodnight, you can see that he’s offended by the idea of putting children in the middle of violent action sequences. But in this movie, children are fair game. While the death of the baby is kept on the grounds that it’s an important plot point, the Hollywood distributors removed the throw away scenes of shanghaied children in the Netherworld being forced to subside on human flesh(!) and Thief Catcher ultimately killing them with dynamite because they’re already beyond saving. Moreover, casual tastelessness like Anthony Wong eating his own severed finger(!!) has also been excised. And when you consider that these scenes are juxtaposed with “beautiful” ones like Anita Mui walking through a residential area covered in bubbles because dozens of children are on the balcony blowing bubbles, you know you’re dealing with a Hong Kong film at its Hong Kong-iest.
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