in Criterion Month

The Heroic Trio (1993)

Speaking of Maggie Cheung, The Heroic Trio. This would have absolutely been in my catalogue of tapes I watched on repeat as a kid if I had known about it, as The Heroic Trio feels tonally right at home with the like of Paul W. S. Anderson’s Mortal Kombat and Schumacher’s Batman movies. Instead I watched it for the first time as a grown up who is still pretty passionate about super hero action fantasy and even more enthusiastic about the careers of Maggie Cheung and Michelle Yeoh. But this is a trio and Anita Mui is a bit more of a mystery to me, I’ve only seen her in a couple great Jack Chan movies before. After seeing The Heroic Trio, I’ve gotta wonder if maybe I have another actor’s filmography I now need to explore?

A dingy and somewhat dystopian city is gripped by a terrible crime spree under the orders of the twisted eunuch the Evil Master (Yen Shi-Kwan). Under his orders, dozens of babies have been mysteriously kidnapped and the police have no clue why or how. In a daring action sequence that does slightly remind me of an infamous disaster of an opening scene from another movie, an invisible kidnapper steals two babies from the hospital and is stopped escaping out the window in mid-air by the local hero, Wonder Woman (Anita Mui). Wonder Woman is actually Tung, the wife of a police inspector and in no way related to the DC comics super hero. Despite some dazzling wirework, Tung is unable to stop the unseen kidnapper from getting away with one of the babies. We find out that the Invisible Woman is actually Ching (Michelle Yeoh), the Evil Master’s right hand but also secretly Tung’s sister (and also totally unrelated to the Marvel comics super hero).

Meanwhile, across town a hostage crisis is unfolding at some sort of chemical plant. The police watch helplessly as one of the hostages is killed and they look like they’re about to give into the captors’ demands when a motorcycle rolls up and the Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung) introduces herself. She’s a mercenary and bounty hunter today, but when she was younger she was just Chat, Ching’s friend. Chat uses a rocket and a barrel to launch herself into the warehouse and then blasts the bad guys away with her shotgun. That’s kinda the big difference between Chat and the other two, while the sisters use martial arts and cool fantasy weapons, Chat’s all about conventional firepower. Anyway, being a bounty hunter, Chat offers to find the missing babies for a fee but her methods are insanely reckless, which puts her at odds with Tung too, and, as the late great Carl Weathers would put it, baby we’ve got a stew going.

One quick spoiler section, you can skip this if you want and just go on to the next paragraph. It’s not too long until we get our first three-way battle between the trio and it’s pretty disappointing for two reasons: one, Michelle Yeoh is invisible so she’s not actually *in* the fight and two… their fight causes a baby to fall and become impaled and ultimately die. I’m not gonna lie, that kinda killed the vibe for me for a while. I know it’s this movie taking a shot at Hard Boiled, but still. You can’t even put this on Evil Master, it’s Chat that abducted the baby to lure out Ching and Tung started the fight. It’s on them. I mean, the movie plays it like it is a big deal and incredibly tragic, but for me it was still a bit too much for this type of movie. Maybe I’m just being a wussy American? It’s the kind of thing that I can imagine if I was watching this with a group of friends we’d be laughing or going “oh shit oh fuck oh shit” and be able to get through it no problem, but watching it alone I was just like “I can’t believe they’ve done this.” Anyway, more kids die later but it’s not as bad.

Every single location in The Heroic Trio looks fake and that’s a good thing. We’re in a heightened reality where the architecture is huge, it’s always dark, it’s always windy, it’s always foggy. Just the way I want it to be. I want to go so far as to say the vibes are immaculate, except I can’t because there is that one part of the movie that was so shocking to me I took a little while to gather myself. You just don’t see that sort of thing in light action movies very often, you know? The Fate of the Furious would be a very different movie if it had the balls The Heroic Trio has.

This was only my second time watching a movie from director Johnnie To — I also saw 2012’s Drug War which is awesome in a very different way — and now I’m thinking I should check out some more of what he’s been up to. At the very least, I should probably watch The Heroic Trio‘s sequel, Executioners, which also came out in 1993. That’s a good sign, right? At the very least, Criterion put them both in this blu ray box set I bought randomly on Colin’s birthday because they did a flash sale. Thanks Criterion for giving me homework that I pay for myself. It’s like college all over!