The Heroic Trio (1992)
Review by Doc Ezra
Film:
DVD:

Written by Sandy Shaw
Directed by Johnny To
Martial Arts Direction by Ching Siu Tung
Starring Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui, Maggie Chung, Damian Lau, Anthony Wong, and James Pak.

Rating: R

Anamorphic: Yes

My advice: Rental, buy for the wire-fu enthusiast.

Someone’s snatching children from hospital maternity wards all over the city. No motive is evident, no demands are made, and no perpetrator is ever seen, regardless of the level of surveillance or presence of sensor equipment. The police are confounded, and the chief is getting increasingly nervous, as his own wife is due to deliver a son any minute now.

Locking down the hospital and surrounding it with dozens of cops, everyone is astounded when two infants rise from their cradles and begin floating out the window. The invisible assailant is foiled (partially), by the sudden appearance of Shadow Fox, a mysterious woman superhero with astounding kung fu skills.

Shadow Fox (Mui) solicits the aid of a former cohort, the gun-toting, Harley-riding Mercy (Cheung), to recover the “one that got away.” Apparently the two of them were once enslaved to a mysterious figure of supernatural power, and they suspect that the invisible kidnapper is none other than one of their former co-captives. In order to save the children, they’ll have to defeat this supernatural evil and, hopefully, redeem Invisible Girl (Yeoh) from his wicked sway.

The Heroic Trio is kung fu superhero fun of the first order. The plot is simple, the characters rendered larger than life, and the action is non-stop. Like much of Hong Kong cinema, the movie is by turns comic and tragic, but through both swings of the pendulum there’s plenty of wire-flying buttkicking to keep the story moving along at a healthy clip. The three female leads are excellent, from Yeoh’s tortured Invisible Girl to the swaggering cockiness of Cheung’s Mercy.

The movie looks great on DVD, with excellent picture and sound, and well-selected voice actors for the English dub. I’m so glad that there was a paradigm shift in kung fu cinema away from the over-the-top melodrama of late 70s to mid 80s films. People seem to want to treat the source material seriously, and give it a chance to succeed or fail on its own merit, rather than poisoning the well with bad voice acting.

Alas, nobody is yet taking the DVD treatment of these films seriously, at least on this side of the Pacific. The disc features no features, a truly frustrating oversight given the reasonably ready availability of the primary actors, not to mention the immense popularity of the title worldwide. You’d think with the growing fanbase for Hong Kong cinema in the United States, somebody could bother to include the occasional featurette or talent interview. Hell, even some filmographies would be nice, giving newcomers a few reference points for finding similar films.

Fans of the genre have to pick this one up. The Heroic Trio is a contemporary classic of the form, and no collection would be complete without it. It will sting a bit, though, to see that no effort was put forth to provide a value-added video release. If you’re put off by wire fu, then this one won’t please you with its plainly impossible fight sequences and stunts, but perhaps couched in the superhero trappings it will seem less problematic. All others need to give it a rental at the very least.