Back to Master List

Back to Asian Films

The Heroic Trio

English Dubbed Version 

AKA: Dong fang san xia; Eastern Three Heroes

Version: Video (Miramax version)

Rated: R

Length: Approx. 104 minutes

Cast: Michelle Yeoh, Anita Mui, Maggie Cheung, Damian Lau, Anthony Wong

I acquired this film as a freebie with a set of anime. Soon thereafter, I read about it on StompTokyo and thought it sounded pretty good. Or at least, the event followed something like that.

It seems that the Miramax version was edited. When you go out and read reviews of this movie, you will here a lot about cannibalism. This version doesn't have that. You'll also find that the Internet Movie Database (and various movie review sites) think that the heroines in the movie have goofy names, like Wonder Woman or Thief Catcher. Whatever. Those names never appear in the version I saw.

I apologize for not keeping the sequence of events straight. Unfortunately, I repeatedly got confused about who was whom in this show and that makes it all the harder to review this. You will just have to bear with me.

Anyway, it all begins with a baby kidnapping. Ching, AKA Invisible Woman (Michelle Yeoh) is stealing a baby and Tun, AKA Wonder Woman (Anita Mui) stops her, sort of. You see, Yeoh has stolen two babies, and drops one so that Mui has to catch it and let Yeoh get away. A lot of wire work goes on as babies float and Mui runs across power lines. It's rather amusing, to tell the truth.

After Yeoh gets away, she goes into the sewers and give the baby to her master, after whupping some idiot guard. The Evil Master (Yee Kwan Yan) puts the babies in big bird cages and wants them all killed on a certain date. 

Mui is the wife of a cop that is oblivious to her other identity. He seems to be a prominent detective or beat cop on the case of the missing babies. Thus, Mui is kept informed as to the progress of the case.

Okay. Somewhere in here, we get introduced to Chat, AKA Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung). She is a kind of vigilante-for-hire. For her scene, we see a bunch of terrorists take over a factory / office building and get into a fire fight with the cops. Thief Catcher comes along and gets into the building by riding an empty, exploding oil barrel. It's quite messed up, but very laughable.

After her amazing kick-butt action, the Chief of Police, who has had his baby kidnapped, hires her to rescue his kid. To do this, Thief Catcher goes to a hospital and kidnaps another child to try and lure out the original kidnapper. Here is where a plot hole begins. Why would Yeoh care about this baby over any other!? We shall never know. However, Thief Catcher was followed by Mui and a fight ensues. Near the end of the fight, Yeoh shows up too and more action occurs.

Confused? That's not good as we're not even close to the end.

In here somewhere, we must meet Yeoh's beau, an inventor (James Pak) of invisible cloaks. He's not much of an actor, but he plays a rather important role. It seems he's made the cloak Yeoh uses (which she must have stolen) and is working  on one that will work in the daylight too...

Eventually, the Evil Master sends out his servant to kill someone and Mui manages to kill him, or so we are lead to believe. Cheung goes into the sewers and also does some interesting battling, but the Master gets some poisonous pieces of metal into her arm and commands Yeoh to kill Cheung). Somehow, the two women know each other, but I'm not too clear on that.

Yeoh (or maybe it's Cheung) ends up taking a big knife and slicing out the poison. And sometime all three get together and decide to take out the Evil Master. This is all very muddled as we learn that Yeow knows Mui too. What the!? Yes, there are some flashbacks to two young girls and one of them seems to die, but as far as I could tell, there were ONLY two, not three girls. Maybe I missed something!?

The last fight couple of fight scenes are ugly affairs. The Evil Master's henchman didn't die or he had another one (a clone?) and he tries to off Yeoh's beau. This fight sequence isn't pretty, but it's nothing to the one where the three ladies go after the Evil Master. He ends up being a bloody skeleton that tries to possess Yeoh. Ugh!

The Good Stuff:

The Bad Stuff:

This was an entertaining movie, but I don't recommend it for the squeamish at heart nor for the young 'uns. Watch it if you'd like to see a chick kung fu movie.