Past Misdeeds: Heroic Trio (1993)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only the most basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.


An invisible villain is stealing babies from their cribs and out of hospitals! The evildoer even mocks the police by announcing his or her victims beforehand. Not even the son of Hong Kong's chief of police is safe, as hard as the policeman responsible for the case, Inspector Lau (Damian Lau), is trying. Eventually, the local superheroine (Anita Mui) - depending on the version of your subtitles either called the copyright-endangered The Wonder Woman or the incredibly boring "Super Heroine" - takes an interest in the case, which may or may not have something to do with her being Lau's wife Tung when she's not fighting evil while wearing a mask. But alone, not even she is able to catch the invisible fiend.

Said fiend is a woman named Ching (Michelle Yeoh), using an experimental invisibility device that is still in development created by a scientist she's shacking up with. Ching is in the service of someone only known as Evil Master or Old Bastard (Yen Shi-Kwan). Evil Master is a person of dubious gender (so probably supposed to be a eunuch) with a most excellent plan: make one of the stolen babies - all of whom are astrologically destined to greatness - the emperor of China and turn the rest of them into his cannibal assassins. It's quite obvious that Ching is conflicted about the whole baby stealing business, but years of brainwashing are difficult to get rid of.

Once the police chief's baby has been stolen, another costumed heroine appears. Chat aka The Thief Catcher aka Seventh Chan is more of a bounty hunter than Wonder Woman is, preferably - though not exclusively - working for money. Chat is also an escapee of the Old Bastard's assassin program, and an old friend of Ching's, who once let her friend live when Evil Master told her to kill Chat.

As a heroine, Chat is of the rather reckless sort, prepared to pull stupid stunts like kidnapping a baby herself to provoke the invisible baby stealer into action. That's the sort of plan that in a Hong Kong movie has a good chance to end with a dead baby, which it does. However, this does at least bring Chat into contact with Tung and lets the bounty hunter realize who is stealing all the babies and why. Eventually - but not before it is revealed that Tung and Ching have a common past too - the three women will throw their lots in with one another and give the Old Bastard what he's got coming.

Before Johnnie To had his own production house, he was working as a director for hire like just about anyone else in Hong Kong's industry. Most of his films of this period don't show as much of the hand of their auteur as we are accustomed from him now, and are instead realized in the directorial style of the minute in Hong Kong, making them decidedly professional and strangely impersonal affairs.

Nonetheless, some of To's movies of that time period are pretty great movies, or are even, as is the case with Heroic Trio, minor classics of their kind. Heroic Trio might be an impersonal effort by the standards of its director, but it also features action directed by the great Ching Siu-Tung, and perfectly adapts nearly everything that is great about early 90s wire fu movies to the superhero genre that wasn't exactly filled with great movies at a point in time when Tim Burton's Batman movies seemed to be as good as superheroes could get on film.

The wire fu film's combination of the insane, the bizarrely violent, the poetry of bodies in motion, the slapstick-y and the melodramatic always had clear parallels to what's great about the superhero genre (one could even argue that wuxia heroes are old-timey superheroes with swords), so making a wire fu superhero movie seems like an obvious direction to take the genre in.

Of course, obvious directions don't always lead to watchable films. In Heroic Trio's case, though, they do. Even though you can criticize To's direction as being strictly inside the parameters of early 90s wire fu, with all the Dutch angles, wobbly zooms and dramatic slow motion shots that implies, one would have to be a soulless monster not to enjoy this style of filmmaking, especially when the action sequences between the scenes of melodramatic slo-mo crying are choreographed by someone like Ching who knows how to let non-martial artists like Anita Mui and Maggie Cheung look more or less convincing in a fight, or at least as convincing as is necessary in this sort of film. Michelle Yeoh for her part doesn't need anyone to let her look good in an action scene, of course.

It's also a true joy to watch a movie featuring three female superheroes where the heroines' competence is never questioned by anyone. "But you're a girl" is just not a sentence that belongs in a film coming from a wuxia tradition so rich in female heroes, so nobody ever utters it. On a slightly more superficial level, and one slightly less feminism-compatible one, seeing our competent heroines played by Mui, Yeoh and Cheung is the sort of experience that can distract a guy from a movie's flaws quite well, too.

Truth be told, I'm not even sure I should call Heroic Trio's problems flaws at all. Perhaps, interpreting them as simple markers of their place and time would be much fairer, especially given how much more enjoyable they make the movie at hand. How, after all, can I resist a script that turns a decidedly simple basic plot into a more or less labyrinthine construction of flashbacks, side plots and contrived connections between characters? And how could I not approve of a superhero movie actually willing to kill a baby, even if it's only to give Mui the opportunity to cry some very decorative tears? And how could I not enjoy Heroic Trio's sudden, generous, bursts of ridiculous, awesome nonsense like Anthony Wong (playing the original cannibal assassin) munching on his own cut off finger, or the great moment in the film's finale when the Big Bad has been reduced to a skeleton and decides to ride Yeoh's body like a bony puppeteer? How not to love a film morally dubious enough to throw in a scene of one of its heroines mercy-killing a bunch of cannibal toddlers for no good reason at all?


If Heroic Trio is one thing, it truly is the embodiment of the whole of Hong Kong wire fu filmmaking in 1993.

On WTF: Heroic Trio (1993)

If you have even the smallest place in your heart for wire fu, superhero movies or female-lead action movies, you'll be pleased by this week's column on WTF-Film, I hope.

Directed by a mercenary era Johnnie To, and action directed by Ching Siu-Tung, Heroic Trio tells of the baby-kidnapping, child-killing adventures of Anita Mui, Michelle Yeoh and Maggie Cheung. To see me go on about the film a bit longer, just click on through.

 

Technorati-Markierungen: hong kong movies,reviews,superheroes,action,johnnie to,ching siu-tung,anita mui,michelle yeoh,maggie cheung,other places

The Magic Crane (1993)

We are in martial world China. The Emperor has ordered a meet-up of the nine great martial arts schools, so that the groups can peacefully arrange those things which usually end in large fights between them.

Alas, being peaceful is not in the program of the upstart Dragon School and their master, the nastily disposed So Pang Hoi (Lawrence Ng). So Pang Hoi wants to become the master of the martial world, and what better way is there to achieve his goal than to attack the congregation with poisoned rubber bats? The bats of evil nearly do everyone in, but an oversized crane (doll) kills them all.

The crane belongs to a girl named Cloud/Pak Wan-Fai (Anita Mui), excellent martial artist and kung flute player. Her further assistance is needed, because all masters of the various schools, except for Yat Yeung-Tze (Damian Lau), the "leader" of the very insignificant Diancang School, have been poisoned by the bats and now need all their concentration to stave off death. Fortunately, Yat Yeung-Tze's only student, the loveable-but-only-mildly-competent Ma Kwun-Mo (Tony Leung Chiu-Wai) has already had several meet-cutes with Cloud and asks for her help in curing the poisoned. So Ma Kwun-Mo and Cloud ride off on the crane to kill a giant fire-breathing turtle whose bile is the only cure for the poison. At the same time, Yat Yeung-Tze will take care of business at the home front.

Both projects shouldn't be much of a problem, but Cloud, or rather her master Lam Hoi Ping (Norman Chu), has an enemy the girl does not know about: Blue Butterfly (Rosamund Kwan), who has sworn to kill Lam - her father - for having left her and her mother to die in a burning palace he rescued Cloud from (further explanation not forthcoming). Blue Butterfly uses her superior lute fu to make everyone's life miserable.

At the same time, Yat Yeung-Tze has to fight through the usual squabbles and conspiracies amongst the martial artists and against the ambitions of the power-hungry General Tsao Hung (Zhang Tielin). And it's only getting more complicated from then on.

Benny Chan's The Magic Crane seems to be the Tsui-Hark-produced--and-written wuxia nobody likes to talk about. That's patently unfair, because this is an absolutely awe-inspiring film.

Sure, Chan is a gun-for-hire director without much of a personal touch, but Tsui Hark's hands-on production approach prevents the film from ever becoming boring or merely competent.

The script is - as is the wuxia genre's wont - telling a basically simple story in exceedingly complicated ways, with a large cast of characters, all of which turn out to be equally important. Depending on how you look at it, it's either sprightly and sprawling or utterly chaotic. I'd go with the former, if possibly only out of thankfulness for The Magic Crane's incessant madness and manic energy. I also suspect that the film was made with an audience in mind that knows at least the basics of the wuxia novel it is based on, making some of its elements less clear to those like me who haven't.

But "Understanding the plot" isn't the point here anyway. Forward momentum rules the screen.

The film just doesn't seem to know where to stop, and if it knew, it still wouldn't do it as a matter of general principle. There's something absurdly wonderful or wonderfully absurd to be experienced in every scene. Besides the lute fu and the flute fu, the ridiculous crane and the possibly even more ridiculous turtle, there's also sex fu, a lady fighter with underwear trouble (feel the power of Hong Kong "humour"!), a deadly poison that can only be cured by sex, an utterly random evil old guy who is chained up in a hole in the ground and feeds a magic martial arts manual to someone (with terrible mutation consequences, of course), bell fu, a peculiar tornado, a wonderful sound wave stance fight - it just goes on and on. Whatever weird thing you want to imagine is in here, so many weird things even that the usual scenes of people flying through the air (which is of course in here too) seem perfectly quaint in context.

Oh, and did I mention that the film's big bad is disposed off by being blown up with a flute? Or that the film ends with the sweet, sweet promise of legal polygamy (oh, the wonders of Chinese culture!)?

Of course, this high concentration of madness leads to a certain lack of depth in characterization (although the actors are doing what they can), and doesn't exactly help to make the film's themes clear, but complaining about it is like complaining that there are noodles in your instant ramen.

I'm pretty sure the world would be a much better place if everyone would just go with the program and watch The Magic Crane.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,wuxia,wtf,benny chan,tsui hark,reviews,tony leung chiu-wai,anita mui,rosamund kwan