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

Swordsman (1990)

When a retired official of the Chinese Emperor steals a scroll containing the secrets of an invincible form of martial arts from one of those notoriously evil and hard to kill eunuchs (Lau Shun) to ensure the future of his children, the plan backfires a little.

Soon, he and his family are slaughtered by the Eunuch's henchpeople (among them Jackie Cheung in one of his few outings as an evil bastard). Before he dies, the official can just inform Ling Wu Chung (Sam Hui), the pupil of his friend, the leader of the Wa Mountain School (Lau Siu-Ming) of the scroll's hiding place and ask the young man to deliver the secret to his son.

Of course, this being a wuxia and all, what should be an easy delivery of a small piece of information turns into a quest of epic proportions with double-crosses, the song that won't ever go away, snake throwing, girls badly disguised as boys and more flying people than in the last general meeting of the Marvel Universe. Limbs will be torn, hearts will be broken and honor sacrificed to ambition.

Swordsman obviously had quite a troubled production history, but the accounts I found of it are so inconsistent that I don't think it prudent to go into it too much. Let's just stay with the fact that the HKMDB lists six directors for the film - King Hu (who is the official director going by the titles), Tsui Hark, Ching Siu-Tung, Ann Hui, Andrew Kam and Raymond Lee. At a guess and based on my knowledge of their other films I would say that most of the movie was directed by Tsui Hark and Ching Siu-Tung, with a few scattered scenes (the rather melancholic moments in the first half of the film come to mind) by King Hu, but it's impossible to know for sure. What I can say for sure is that the film is very much a new wave wuxia as one would expect of Hark and Ching.

For a film directed by just about everyone, Swordsman stays surprisingly consistent in tone and content. It is a little complicated for the uninitiated, perhaps even convoluted, but that has always been the wuxia way of storytelling. "Let's just throw as much of everything on the screen as possible, and do it well, and let the audience (with the knowledge of the novels our films are based on) do the rest", seems to be the main thrust of the philosophy behind these films, and usually - as well as in this case - this works out well even for people not familiar with the sources.

While Swordsman's plot is complicated, it is quite comprehensible when one sets one's mind on understanding it, this time even with quite clearly understandable character motivations, but - and that's one of the aspects I love about this genre the most - the film works perfectly well as a string of little marvels; just going with the flow is as pleasant as understanding everything.

One of the deepest pleasures of this phase of wuxia filmmaking lies in the way the complex plotting and the incessant motion of the fight scenes are intertwined, making the flying and spiraling people with the superhuman powers and the archetypal psychology the logical consequence of the shifting world they find themselves in.

Swordsman seems to me like a perfect specimen of its genre, with wonders and small, lovely moments of humanity to spare that quietly tell the story of a bunch of young people declining to become like their elders.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,king hu,tsui hark,ching siu-tung,sam hui,cecilia yip,jacky cheung,wuxia,reviews

The Sword (1980)

This is going to get a wee bit complicated. A swordsman called Li Mak-Yin (Adam Cheng) is looking for a man named Wah (or Fa, in any case played by Feng Tien) who is supposed to be the greatest swordsman of the age. Li Mak-Yin has the ambition to claim that title for himself. Finding Wah isn't easy, though, because the man has retired and hides away from the masses of minor swordsmen that want to fight him to prove their worth.

After searching for ten years, Li Mak-Yin finally finds the older swordsman's trail. A trader in information sells him a map to Wah's supposed home. Unfortunately it turns out to be lying in ruin. Only another searcher for Wah dwells there. He is quite mad and attacks Li Mak-Yin, whom he thinks to be Wah. After a short but intense fight, the mad man's head flies into the sunset. Our designated hero decides to rest in the empty ruins.

In the middle of the night a young woman (Jade Hsu) suddenly jumps through his window and into his bed. As this is something that happens to wuxia heroes regularly, his reaction is quite blasé. So blasé as to irritate the young lady enough to jump annoyed out of the room. She prefers dealing with the guy she's trying to escape from to the sudden smell of male smugness her would-be rescuer exudes. My, my, is she falling in love with him?

Li can't let the whole affair just jump away and follows the fleeing girl and her enemy, until he finally wounds the man and drives him away.

Alas, the woman does not show much gratitude and storms away. As luck will have it (a phrase you'll hear quite a bit in the following), both seem to be heading in the same direction and soon a heavy rainfall forces them to seek shelter in the same place. After a few shenanigans with food and drink, the two befriend each other and decide to make their way to the next town together.

When they come upon an inn, Li suddenly starts to act very distant. As luck will have it, a woman who arrives at the exact same moment as the two is Yin Siu-Hyu (Qiqi Chen), the love of his youth whom he left to pursue the elusive Wah.

Their meeting is full of repressed emotions and dutiful recognition of their social responsibilities. Nonetheless another window jumper suddenly attacks Li only to be called back by Yin Siu-Hyu's arriving husband Lin Wan (Norman Chu). He seems to be a nice enough fellow; a little too fearful for his wife's security perhaps. Li finds the situation kind of awkward anyway and excuses himself as fast as possible only to find that his other girlfriend has run off in a fit of jealousy.

While he follows her, we learn that Lin Wan isn't as nice as we thought. When his wife defends Li a little too eagerly for his taste, he hits her. As luck will have it, Lin Wan is also looking for Wah and does not like competition. So he sends his main henchman out to kill Li, while he himself takes care of the information trader.

Being a designated hero, Li is not that easy to kill. The fight ends inconclusive, with Li seriously hurt.

Fortunately a woman named Yeun Kai (Chau Wa Ngai) finds him and tends to his wounds. When he is well again, his rescuer receives a letter concerning an old friend of hers, a master swordsman whose enemies have kidnapped his daughter to press him into dueling them. Yeun Kai asks Li to rescue said daughter, something he does gladly when he reads that her father's name is (as luck will have it) Wah. His host even gives him a sword Wan once gave to her, although without knowing that it is an evil sword that will bring only suffering to the one who wields it (and obviously the ones hit by it).

Li is able to rescue Wah's daughter. She is, as luck will have it, the same girl he befriended before. She gladly takes him to her father who is very grateful for Li's deed. Grateful enough to grant the younger man his wish for a duel (which pisses off Ying-Chi royally).

Since we are still far from the end of the movie, Li wins the duel while wounding Wah only slightly.

Li is quite dissatisfied with the way things turned out. It's not as fulfilling to be the best than he always thought it would be. Well, he shouldn't fret, the film has a few more bad surprises for him, starting with Lin killing the recuperating Wah by deepening the wound he already received from Lin, so that Ying-Chi swears vengeance on Li while Lin steals what he really wanted - not fame for the killing of Wah, but the man's  sword; and, now that he really thinks about it, Li's sword would be nice, too.

How will Li escape these cunning plans? How many of the three women will survive the final reel? Will there be more destined twists of fate?

As you can see, The Sword's plot is quite complicated even for a wuxia and relies even more heavily on luck  than many masalas. That's not a big problem when one is able to accept the concept of fate or destiny as the base of the film's intellectual and especially moral world, as one just accepts faster than light travel in a space opera.

More problematic is that the film feels like a very uneasy marriage of different styles that director Patrick Tam can't fuse well enough to form a film that's a complete artistic success. Firstly we have a stiffened variation of classic wuxia melodrama that's just a little bit more slow-going than those elements usually are - unfortunately this "little bit" is the important bit that drags the film down and makes it feel a lot longer than the lean 85 minutes it really is.

Secondly we have a few moments of much more real (in an art house sense) human emotions, two of them bound to short bursts of violence that aren't as bloody but much more shocking than a decapitation. In themselves, these are highly successful scenes, but they don't fit into the same world as the action sequences or the melodrama.

Thirdly there is a handful of great to brilliant action scenes directed by Ching Siu-Tung, that are - except for the final fight - not as over the top as some of his later directorial works, but are reason enough to slog even through the most dishonest of melodramatic scenes. The use of the color red in the last few scenes is especially striking and in a few minutes does a lot more to connect the melodrama to the fighting than the rest of the film did in an hour.

A reason for the strange schizophrenia The Sword shows could be the awkward historical place it takes. In 1980, the traditional swordplay film was more or less dead (if you ignore the works of Chor Yuen, who either didn't or wouldn't care), first replaced by the kung fu film, then by the new wave of kung fu; it would take a few years more until people like Ching Siu-Tung and Tsui Hark would renew the genre (in a way unthinkable without the films of Chor Yuen, but that's really another story). I take films like this or Hark's artistically more successful Butterfly Murders as first steps on the way to the new wuxia. Unfortunately, first steps aren't always satisfying.

Further complicating the matter is the future career path of Patrick Tam which soon lead him to much more art house oriented films that agreed a lot more with his sensibilities.

All in all, The Sword isn't the kind of film I'd recommend to people who haven't watched a lot of wuxia movies, but for those of us who have, it's an interesting object of study with the added bonus of a handful of brilliant scenes.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,reviews,wuxia,patrick tam,ching siu-tung,jade hsu,adam cheng,feng tien,norman chu

In short: Wonder Seven (1994)

I am a pretty big admirer of director Ching Siu-Tung's films, so I am biased in favor of this film, but really, what's not to like in a classic Hong Kong action film of the lighter and friendlier sort?

There is some kind of plot. A group of seven grown-up orphans works in Hong Kong as a crack top secret police team for the Chinese government (which would also make them something of secret agents, I suppose). Top secret as they may be, their style is about as subtle as you expect from seven people living on a houseboat when not flying through the air on or off their motorbikes while shooting wildly.

Would you believe that their newest case will lead them into a confrontation with mad villains, traitorous superiors, their old trainer and an incredible number of nameless henchmen?

There is lots of jumping, exploding, shooting, flying and completely ignoring those pesky laws of physics of course. As an additional bonus, Ching Siu-Tung also packs in some of his favorite colors, a love sub-plot with Michelle Yeoh as redemptive villainess (who really knows how to wear a scarf), and a Viking burial on a motorcycle.

I really don't know what more one could ask for.

 

Technorati-Tags: hong kong movies,in short,michelle yeoh,ching siu-tung,action