Though he’s known today as one of Hong Kong’s most distinctive contemporary filmmakers, in the early 1990s Johnnie To was still a gun for hire. Having apprenticed for the region’s TVB broadcasting network for most of the ’80s, he had only recently established himself as a reliable maker of action and comedy films. And chief among his early successes is 1993’s wuxia superhero film The Heroic Trio, which is at once indebted to his genre forebears in Hong Kong cinema and possessed of his own idiosyncratic skills.
Like so many wuxia classics, the film’s plot is at once unnecessarily convoluted and little more than justification for moving from one stunt set piece to the next. In the sewers beneath present-day Hong Kong’s bustling streets, an ancient court eunuch, Evil Master (Yen Shi-Kwan), abducts newborns of imperial blood and raises them as potential new emperors in a perverse revanchist scheme to revive the Chinese royalty. The master sends out his best warrior, Invisible Woman (Michelle Yeoh), to steal these babies, though she’s increasingly beset not only by police, but two vigilante heroines: Wonder Woman (Anita Mui) and Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung), both of whom share a past connection with the kidnapper.
With that setup established, the remainder of the film barrels through increasingly elaborate set pieces. Early scenes pit Wonder Woman and Thief Catcher against the Invisible Woman living up to her namesake, which results in a lot of flying and kicking around an empty space where Yeoh’s adversary should be, complete with objects and people held aloft to mimic Invisible Woman’s movements. It’s delirious, exciting nonsense, edited to alternately smooth out the discontinuity of Cheung and Mui striking at empty space and deepening the absurdity via ballistic montages that deliberately double down on the confusion.
Later, the heroes must also battle Evil Master’s zombified, nigh-indestructible henchman (Anthony Wong), who wields a flying guillotine right out of a Shaw Brothers classic, only in a modern setting. In the film’s most memorable action scene, the heroines fight this killer in a subway station, the flurry of martial arts attacks upended by spectacles like a derailed train careening into the space or dynamite lobbed at this seemingly invulnerable fighter.
The Heroic Trio is perched between Hong Kong’s two eras of modern genre fare: the old-school spectacle of wire-fu stunt work and wild flourishes of camera movement and action, and the post-New Wave emphasis on sleek urban cool, stoic honor, and pervasive social malaise. These are about as tonally different as two styles can get, which may explain why the film feels like a shotgun marriage that exists only to play up tropes of Hong Kong cinema to the hilt.
The film’s commercial success rushed a sequel into production, and Executioners, which To co-directed with both movies’ stunt coordinator, Ching Siu-tung, came out before the end of the same calendar year. The speed of that turnaround, combined with the fact that this was the fourth film that To assembled in 1993 and that he must have been running on fumes, contributes to a pervading sense of this being an undercooked project.
The sequel awkwardly relocates the central trio to a post-apocalyptic version of Hong Kong. It also breaks apart the main characters after only fully uniting them at the end of The Heroic Trio, resulting in a disjointed narrative that jumps uninspiringly between isolated subplots, only for them to quickly come together for an afterthought of a climax. There are still some dazzling stunts, and the cinematography vividly captures the full chromatic range of the expressionistic sets, but Executioners ultimately feels like a sizzle reel of most of its predecessor’s shallowest bits and little of its charms, standing to date as one of To’s weakest offerings.
Image/Sound
Both films pop with color and brightness on the Criterion Collection’s 4K transfer. While the lighting in exterior scenes and the exaggerated glow of some soundstage shots look washed out on old DVD copies of these movies, they now retain detail and texture while reflecting the full intensity of the stylized cinematography. Colors look stable and boast rich gradation, and there are no visible instances of print damage or faded clarity.
The original mono soundtracks also represent a significant upgrade from earlier home video presentations, losing the faint echo that often plagues the post-sync dubbing on old Hong Kong DVDs. Dialogue is crisp and centered while the music cues and sound effects of clanging steel blades and whooshing aerial attacks fill the additional space without compression issues. There are also English dubs and new 5.1 Cantonese remixes for both films, though the later ends up revealing a bit too much of the separation between various audio elements on the soundtrack.
Extras
Criterion’s disc comes with only a few extras, including two new interviews. In the first, actor Anthony Wong reminisces about The Heroic Trio and Executioners, and in the second, critic Samm Deighan places the films in the context of Johnnie To’s career and the commercial Hong Kong industry of the early 1990s. A booklet essay by critic Beatrice Loayza similarly unpacks To’s career and the enduring cult popularity of The Heroic Trio.
Overall
Johnnie To’s antic superhero cult classics receive an excellent 4K transfer from Criterion that reveals the full beauty of films long done a disservice by low-quality bootlegs.
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