Entertainment
‘The Heroic Trio’ Is an Essential 1993 Cult Film with Michelle Yeoh
On Friday nights, IndieWire After Dark honors fringe cinema in the streaming age with midnight movies from any moment in film history.
First, the BAIT: a weird genre pick, and why we’re exploring its specific niche right now. Then, the BITE: a spoiler-filled answer to the all-important question, “Is this old cult film actually worth recommending?”
The Bait: Cure Superhero Fatigue with Wind Machines, 18 Babies, and a Flying Trash Can
If you have not yet had the pleasure of discovering Hong Kong filmmaker Johnnie To, uh… you know, I think you can find “Election” online somewhere? “Election” rules. “Exiled” rules. “Vengeance” is interesting. If you can find “PTU,” that’s a great one, especially for those of us in the Lam Suet hive (there are dozens of us! Dozens!).
There are something close to 50 of To’s movies to choose from, and all of them have a wonderful visual liveliness — plus a compelling, svelte sense of place that lives at a particularly fun intersection between the worlds of Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Pierre Melville. When To has his druthers, as he did for most of the 2000s, he delves deep into the inescapable temptation, suffering, and pride of triads and the police who (sometimes) chase them. It’s lots of crime and honor and masculinity, sweaty foreheads and rolled shirtsleeves with suspenders and sexy cigarette smoke.
None of which describes “The Heroic Trio,” which is a film that I almost can’t describe to you, anyway. It’s part of the Criterion Collection, somehow. Probably because the titular trio is played by Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui, and Michelle Yeoh. To is really just jobbing an unhinged Hong Kong wuxia film assignment, made in 1993 before his real auteur breakout with “The Mission” and certainly before Milkyway Image, his production company, allowed him to pursue subjects presumably closer to his heart.
But the reason I have brought “The Heroic Trio” here to IndieWire After Dark is that, while it is very different from many of Johnnie To’s films, it also rules. It might be one of the most creative action-adventure films to come out of HK cinema in the ’90s. It’s a superhero film, kind of? There’s a demon in a sewer/nether dimension, probably? Newborn infants keep getting stolen out of the most brutalist, industrial hospital film set that I have ever seen, for sure.
Watching it again this week, “The Heroic Trio” is 88 minutes of hijinks that are kind of perfect for this moment of daily dissociation from reality. If something doesn’t make sense, don’t worry about that. Just wait eight minutes, and it won’t make sense in a different way, but really rad chicks will still be flying through the air beating up bikers and/or cops and/or stop-motion skeletons.
And that starts right from the jump with Tung (Mui), by day the mild-mannered wife of a policeman (Damian Lau) who leaps out of a window, rides vines like he’s Tarzan down a house to catch the criminal trying to steal his car, and then hands him his own handcuffs. That’s the baseline for the — I want to stress this — forgettable side character who’s going to get rings run around him by the actual protagonists of the film. Tung, despite her lovely, flouncy ’80s housewife hair, goes by Wonder Woman as she nobly protects the city by night, so it’s certainly not where we end.
Tung shares a tragic backstory with Thief Catcher (Cheung) and Invisible Girl (Yeoh). All three, as one might imagine, have incredible agility, combat skills, tensile strength that would make Alex Honnold jealous, and magic and/or sci-fi powers. Life has taken them down very different roads since their childhood — with Cheung basically becoming Faye Valentine before “Cowboy Bebop” and Yeoh having the least fun as the tortured but conflicted servant of the Evil Master (Shi-Kwan Yen) until, of course, she has a change of heart. The Master is a demon who wants to bring back the Emperors of China by stealing lots of babies, and you know that because he has horns.
One thinks of that great font of wisdom, Garth Marenghi: “I know writers who use subtext, and they’re all cowards.” Johnnie To is no coward.
In the past, I’ve described “The Heroic Trio” as what might have happened if Martin Scorsese, already in his cocaine phase, made a low-budget Marvel before he did “Mean Streets.” But that’s not quite right. It’s more melodramatic than that, and much more handmade. The streets here are neither mean nor realistic. They are very clearly sets, and the industrial wind fans are very clearly blowing just out of frame. But the sense of artifice, of play, of how ungodly fast they must have been cranking this movie out, when combined with the comic book aesthetic and a film that builds to our three female leads becoming stronger together? It’s so much fun. Generative AI could never. —SS
The Bite: What Would Wonder Woman Do?
My knowledge of Hong Kong cinema is not “extensive,” by any means. In fact, I came to this week’s After Dark pick so underqualified that, prior to watching “The Heroic Trio,” my best reference for a ’90s kung fu movie was probably Mike Judge’s “Office Space.” (“HEY, PETER, MAN! TURN ON CHANNEL 5! IT’S THE LADY WITH THE BREAST EXA—”)
Now, thanks to the wonderful Sarah Shachat, who never misses with her cult recommendations, I’m looking back on Johnnie To’s beguiling, baffling fantasyland as a newly minted expert. Not in this endlessly fascinating and no doubt overwhelming corner of Asian cinema. But in the dramatic potential of both flying, would-be dictatorial babies, and the visual appeal of Chinese cannibals somehow ripped from the surreal belly of Tarsem’s much later “The Cell.”
Watching “The Heroic Trio” didn’t end for me when the credits rolled (somewhat abruptly, I might add?). Instead, this campy and melodramatic action flick from 1993 mutated into an immersive research experience for me that was firmly anchored in the global pop culture of the time. It didn’t take more than a few Wikipedia entries for me to fall down a rabbit hole that was delightful one minute and devastating the next, for an emotional journey weirdly in sync with To’s film.
The first thing that struck me was how much this release actually worked. Not in a critical “this holds up beyond any conceivable complaint” kind of way. (It, uh, doesn’t!) But at least in the sense that audiences showed up for these badass ladies, and 33 years later, it’s easy to want to do the same. Magnetically strange, and yet obvious big screen heavyweights “The Heroic Trio” had their one and only sequel, “Executioners,” arrive the same year. Set not long after the original movie, in the ruins of a nuclear attack, a city faces collapse as a deformed tyrant hoards the last clean water — forcing the titular triad to stop a looming military coup.
There’s something so satisfying in knowing this maximalist ode to femme chaos merited a shooting star franchise. But then, I learned about the untimely passing of Anita Mui: the intensely popular Chinese entertainer, who dazzled as silver mask-wearing Wonder Woman but died just ten years after To’s duology came out. Mui lost a battle with cervical cancer in 2003, three years after her sister, Ann Mui (also a singer and actress) passed from the same disease.
That’s the sort of hindsight fact that can reframe the story you just watched without changing the contents of it. If anything, Mui’s legacy sharpens “The Heroic Trio” as an artifact of her grounding starpower. There’s a steadiness to Tung/Wonder Woman that stands out for its quiet authority in a frequently goofy landscape peppered with poisonous robes and finger-eating minions. Even as the plot spins into total delirium (I’m sorry, but were those little boys peeing on each other after they escaped their birdcages?!), Mui never lets the team feel unmoored.
Paired with Yeoh’s steely Invisible Girl and Cheung’s punch Thief Catcher, Wonder Woman isn’t just about Mui’s presence but also her control. The way the actress moves through space physically gives even the most frenetic sequences an athletic, almost ethereal sense of direction, and Tung’s reserved ferocity doesn’t so much add to the spectacle as justify it. Mui was a famously disciplined performer, and according to various film scholars and critics of her time, the actress brought a dancer’s precision and a pop singer’s command of rhythm to her screen work.
You can feel that friction in nearly every beat here, and the explosive friction of that methodical push and pull ended up mirrored in my screening notes exactly. One second I’m laughing and jotting down that, “Yes, 18 babies is indeed a lot of babies!” The next, I’m realizing the 19th baby has died after getting his head impaled on a nail (!!). That whiplash shouldn’t work, but thanks to Mui’s heroics, it mostly does.
A lot of that comes down to just how seriously To, Mui, and everyone involved in bringing this wacky vision to life treated Sandy Shaw’s surprisingly challenging script. The set pieces are massive, and the color and lighting are lush in a way that feels almost operatic. The dripping, crimson blood isn’t just shocking but painterly, and ridiculous lines (to wit, “I know that eunuch can’t make you kill me!”) are delivered with full conviction, miraculously making the bonkers plot land progressively harder.
“The Heroic Trio” doesn’t resolve every one of its contradictions, but even stacking sincerity and camp, To hones a striking emotional core that’s crystallized in the bond between these three women and thespians. We’re lucky to still have Cheung and Yeoh working today, but learning more about Mui’s music career, her philanthropy, and the work she did to support protesters fleeing China after the massacre at Tiananmen Square in 1989, adds more weight to her already-key performance.
I’m writing this while listening to one of Mui’s albums, which sounds appropriately sad and sweet. Known as the “Queen of Cantopop,” Mui was a record-breaking performer, whose 1985 album “Bad Girl” became one of Hong Kong’s best-selling releases. She built a career in film across more than 40 movies, winning several major awards. When she died in 2003 at just 40, thousands of fans filled the streets for her funeral. Among the celebrity mourners, Yeoh and Cheung were both reportedly in attendance. —AF
“The Heroic Trio” (1993) is currently streaming on HBO Max.
Read more installments of After Dark, IndieWire’s midnight movie club:
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When we first started to sketch out Sequels Week, one major question kept popping up: OK, so what is a sequel? Or, more pointedly, what isn’t?
Over the course of the next week, we will attempt to answer that question through the celebration (and dissection) of some of the seminal sequels of our time. Naturally, we will also be tackling deeper queries involving the form itself. And, yes, we’ll be using terms like “legacyquel” (coined by our own alum Matt Singer) and “spiritual sequel” that can be a bit harder to pin down and truly define than, say, something like “prequel” or “trilogy.”
But as Hollywood continues to bet big on continuing stories and companion pieces — franchise filmmaking, you know it — these terms are only going to continue being coined. Let us help you make sense of them, plus a handful of related terms, just for fun. (In the interest of clarity, while a number of these terms can apply to other forms of media, from television to comic books, we’re only using them here as they apply to movies.)
(And, because sequels are so indebted to their original works, I wanted to shout out some great resources for this, including this Reddit thread and the website The Sequel Book). Journeying through the wide world of movie sequel terminology is a trip (and a half), and we expect this taxonomy will only grow as Hollywood keeps cooking up weird ways to essentially say “hey, we’re making another movie.”
Behold, our official Sequels Week Taxonomy!
Companion piece
A film that exists within the same universe but does not share the same plot or characters.
Examples: “Zathura” and the “Jumanji” films; “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
Crossover
A film that brings together characters, settings, and/or plots from two or more otherwise (and previously) separate film, franchises, or universes.
Examples: “Freddy vs. Jason,” “Alien vs. Predator,” the upcoming “Avengers: Doomsday.”
Direct-to-video
A sequel (of any kind) to a theatrically released film that bypasses theaters for video, DVD, or Blu-ray only release. Will we also lump streaming into this? We will!
Examples: “The Lion King II: Simba’s Pride,” “8MM 2,” so many “Air Bud” and “American Pie” films.
Franchise
Pretty much every term here and type of sequel on offer falls under the banner of franchise filmmaking. These are the sprawling “universes” of connected films (and, often, television too) that share the same world, characters, and an ongoing storyline. They can include all kinds of sequels, prequels, spin-offs, reboots, remakes, and legacyquels.
Examples: The Marvel Cinematic Universe, the DC Universe, “Star Wars,” James Bond.
Follow-up
As this list goes on, you’re going to get the sense that a lot of these terms are kind of the same thing. You’re not wrong! “Follow-up” is absolutely just another term for “sequel,” but one that seems to pop up when studios, filmmakers, and other brass somehow balk at using the word. See: “next film.”
Examples: Come on, you know the answer already. It’s all sequels.
Legacyquel
A perpetual favorite and one of the few newly-minted terms that really holds water. As IW alum Matt Singer coined it over ten years ago, they are “a very specific kind of sequel — in which beloved aging stars reprise classic roles and pass the torch to younger successors. … These movies are all about revitalizing old franchises through the notion of legacy.”
Examples: “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” the “Creed” films, “Top Gun: Maverick.”
Parallel story
A film that takes place within the same time period as another film, but is told from a different perspective, often using different characters and settings. Also known as a “sidequel.”
Examples: “The Lion King 1 1/2,” “Rosencratz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” “Back to the Future Part II,” “Flags of Our Fathers” and “Letters from Iwo Jima.”
Prequel
Ah, finally, something a little easier to define. It’s a sequel, but it takes place before the action of the previous film.
Examples: “Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom,” “Monsters University,” “The Godfather Part II,” “Rogue One: A Star Wars Story,” “Rise of the Planet of the Apes.”
Pre-prequel
Someone recently used this term in response to the upcoming “Conjuring” prequel “The Conjuring: First Communion,” which is itself a prequel to “Annabelle,” which was a prequel to “The Conjuring.”
Examples: “The Conjuring: First Communion,” “Alien: Prometheus.”
Next film
Ah, here we are again. “Next film” is absolutely just another term for “sequel,” but one that seems to pop up when studios, filmmakers, and other brass somehow balk at using the word. See: “companion piece,” “follow-up.”
Examples: This is a temporal question, and the answer is “whichever film came out after the last one.”
Reboot/remake/reimagining
A new version of an existing story (that’s been put to film before), film, or franchise. Like “follow-up” or “next film,” there are a lot of terms here thrown around for what is essentially the same thing.
Examples: “Batman Begins,” “Casino Royale,” “Star Trek,” “The Mummy,” “Ocean’s Eleven.”
Requel
Often quite similar to the legacyquel, as it will take existing characters and plotlines, add new characters and plotlines, and function as both a prequel and something of a reboot. Sometimes, as is the case with David Gordon Green’s “Halloween” series, this requires ignoring the existence of other prequels and sequels.
Examples: “Star Wars: The Force Awakens,” 2018’s “Halloween,” 2022’s “Scream.”
Spin-off
Similar to a parallel story or a sidequel, a spin-off takes material from an existing film or franchise to make a new story that exists generally in the same universe, but can (crucially) stand alone. Audiences will likely get more out of it if they’re caught up on the entire franchise, but that is not required for enjoyment and understanding.
Examples: “Creed,” “Bumblebee,” “Logan.”
Spiritual sequel
Later this week, we’re going to have an entire list of these films, which will likely go much further to explain what they are and how they function. For now, chew on this: they are films that are similar to or somehow inspired by a previous film, but are not actually a part of that film and its own franchise. They might feature similar characters or be from the same director or writer, but they do not explicitly exist in the same world. They just feel like they can.
Examples: “The French Connection” and “To Live in Die in L.A.,” “Carlito’s Way” and “Scarface,” “Adaptation” and “Being John Malkovich.”
Threequel
The third film in a franchise. This is a mostly silly term, but it is different than “trilogy” (up next), as it can apply to stories that have three or more films.
Examples: “Jaws 3-D,” “The Godfather Part III,” “Toy Story 3,” “The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King.
Trilogy
A film franchise that includes three (and only three!) films.
Examples: “Back to the Future,” “The Lord of the Rings,” “The Dark Knight” trilogy.
Unofficial sequel
Oh, legality! An unofficial sequel is a film made without the consent, involvement, or approval of the original film’s creator (or producers, studio, etc.). They tend to be, at best, scrappy endeavors.
Examples: “Return to Oz,” “Zombi 2,” “Showgirls 2: Penny’s from Heaven.”
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Peacock is expanding its mobile offerings with a new interactive, episodic game called Public Eye.
The murder mystery, which NBCU dubs “microdrama-style storytelling meets interactive crime investigation, is Peacock’s first serialized mobile game.
In the 10-episode mystery, players are Officer Logan Dine, a patrol cop secretly investigating his uncle’s murder in the crime-ridden streets of Caldera City. Every episode features narrative storytelling with puzzle‑driven gameplay, inviting players to search animated scenes for clues, ultimately revealing a conspiracy that runs through the entire police department. The AI-generated visuals paired with Wolf Games’ storytelling expertise create a seamless experience that allows users to drive the story forward themselves.
Public Eye is yet another product of NBCUniversal’s larger pact with Wolf Games, a generative AI startup co-founded by Elliot Wolf, executive producer and son of Law & Order creator Dick Wolf. Earlier this year, Peacock launched Law & Order: Clue Hunter. The app has also dabbled in other games including word games, quizzes and a Wheel of Fortune title.
NBCU says that 40% of Peacock mobile users engaged with a game on the app. The company also adds that Law & Order: Clue Hunter has been one of Peacock’s most successful game launches to date with players spending more than 6 minutes a day on average in the game. The mobile games also appear to be driving new viewers to the shows the IP originated from, as well.
“Public Eye was built to be incredibly easy to step into,” Elliot Wolf, Co-Founder, Wolf Games said in a statement. “Within seconds you’re spotting clues, meeting characters, and feeling a high-stakes story come together under your fingers. It’s a new world of crime and betrayal that keeps you on the edge of your seat and coming back episode after episode. Immersive and cinematic, but as easy to pick up as your morning puzzle.”
“Public Eye sits right at the intersection of two trends users are excited about: microdramas and interactive storytelling. This new experience invites fans to step into the story rather than simply watch it unfold,” John Jelley, SVP, Product UX & Design, NBCUniversal Media Group added in a statement of his own. “Through our work with Wolf Games, we’re exploring how Peacock can bring together video, gameplay, and storytelling in a single destination, creating more opportunities for audiences to engage with the worlds they love throughout the day.”
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Elizabeth Smart has shared her story in a number of various projects before, and now she’s ready to be a platform for other survivors to share theirs.
Starting next Monday, the kidnapping survivor will host the “Survivor Files” podcast, where “survivors of abductions, home invasions, assaults and other traumatic events” will discuss their experiences, while also breaking down the “lifelong process of healing, justice and reclaiming what violence nearly took away.”
“I’m so excited and proud to team up with iHeart and Marwar Junction to launch ‘The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart,’” Smart shared in a Monday statement. “My hope is to honor the extraordinary strength, resilience, hope and courage of survivors. Each of our stories are unique, but so many share a common thread: the strength to keep moving forward in the face of hell. I want this podcast to remind people that we are more than what we experience – and that we are so much stronger than we believed.”
“Elizabeth’s voice has become synonymous with resilience, hope and survivor advocacy,” iHeartPodcasts President Will Pearson added. “Through ‘The Survivor Files,’ she brings a deeply personal perspective to stories that deserve to be told with compassion. We’re excited to partner with Elizabeth and Marwar Junction Productions on a series that expands the true crime genre in such a personal and meaningful way.”
“We are honored Elizabeth asked us to help her launch this important podcast,” Marwar Junction Productions’ Joseph Freed echoed. “These stories have never been more important, and Elizabeth brings them to life with authenticity and care.”
Smart became a household name in 2002 when she was abducted from her Salt Lake City home and held captive for nine months at just 14 years old. She has since become an activist and advocate, sharing her story in memoirs and as a producer for Lifetime.
“The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart” debuts Aug. 17 with iHeartPodcasts.
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Lions center Cade Mays to miss ‘significant’ time with wrist injury
Know Your Movie Sequel Terms: Requel, Revival, Legacy-quel, and More
Peacock Launches First Serialized Mobile Game ‘Public Eye’
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