The Heroic Trio / Executioners: To the Power of Three

The Heroic Trio unfolds in an unspecified, Gotham-like city reminiscent of Hong Kong, and follows Wonder Woman (Mui), Invisible Girl (Yeoh), and Thief Catcher (Cheung) as they join forces against the wicked eunuch Grandmaster (Yen Shi-kwan). This gonzo baddie sends his cronies—including, at first, an enslaved Invisible Girl—to kidnap the city’s babies as part of a grand plot to restore monarchy in China. Following the formation of the women’s supergroup in The Heroic Trio’s final act, Executioners switches gears by flinging them into a postapocalyptic wasteland. A nuclear explosion has devastated the city, and the disfigured despot Mr. Kim (Anthony Wong) takes control of its only known source of clean water. The ladies come together at the beginning of the movie but end up focused on individual quests for peace and order in a chaotic, militarized world—a nightmare vision of what many Hong Kongers at the time felt was on the horizon.

The decade leading up to The Heroic Trio saw increasing awareness of a distinct Cantonese cultural identity, fostered by the golden age of Hong Kong entertainment, but this renaissance was accompanied by an existential crisis. The 1997 handover of the city-state from the United Kingdom to the People’s Republic of China was fast approaching, creating a mood of anxiety that movies of the period absorbed and recast in the form of grand narratives about nationhood and solidarity. To and Ching’s double feature vividly captures this moment of unease in its depiction of women uniting to combat archaic despotism. But even as they evoke a troubled modernity, the films also root their characters in a sense of tradition. The three protagonists are updated versions of the lady knight-errant, a classic archetype in chivalric swordplay movies like Come Drink with Me (1966) and A Touch of Zen (1971). Beginning with The Swordsman (1990) and Once Upon a Time in China (1991)—two projects that involved Ching and maverick filmmaker Tsui Hark—this kind of fantasy-fueled historical epic made a comeback, on a larger scale and with more extravagant special effects. This new style comes through at the start of The Heroic Trio: when Wonder Woman first appears, she races across a row of sparking, pole-mounted electric cables like a basilisk running on water. Blades shoot out of her leather-clad hands, pinning a pair of bundled babes to a wall as she strikes a pose while suspended above a throng of oohing onlookers.

Wonder Woman—who goes by Tung when she is in her civilian guise—is the noblest of the three heroines. As the loving wife of a hotshot police inspector (Damian Lau), she straddles gender-role-abiding femininity and a strapping alter ego that puts her husband’s squad to shame (in the Heroic Trio universe, men are mostly unimpressive). It’s a fitting part for Mui, whose capacity for alluring androgyny had been routinely demonstrated in both her film and pop-music careers. Look at the cover of Mui’s 1985 album The Years Flow Like Water, on which she is dressed in a slouchy suit à la Marlene Dietrich, or her performance as a cross-dressing double agent in the 1990 movie Kawashima Yoshiko. But even as she bends gender norms, Wonder Woman is fueled by a kind of divine maternal instinct: in The Heroic Trio, she is on a mission to protect all the babies in the city; in Executioners, she has retired from crime-fighting to focus on raising her own daughter. Mui’s silky contralto, which permeates the films’ soundtracks, adds 
to the character’s supernatural glow. In one scene in the first film, Wonder Woman fails to catch a baby from hitting the ground during a nocturnal face-off with Invisible Girl—who, at this point, is still doing the evil Grandmaster’s bidding. When Wonder Woman finally manages to get a hold of the child, blood gushes from out of the back of its head, cuing the passionate power ballad “A Woman’s Heart.” Mui’s vocals place the scene in a melodramatic key, complementing the achy-blue backdrop and the gust of wind that makes her hair quiver. It’s one of several moments that indicate these women aren’t just preternaturally powerful—they’ve also got soul.