Saturday, August 22, 2009

Three of a Kind

The Heroic Trio is pretty easy to sum up: Michelle Yeoh, Maggie Cheung, Anita Mui. To be specific:
  • Anita Mui, the "funny-looking Madonna", is the wife of a policeman, but secretly a superhero: Wonderwoman or Shadow Fox, depending on the translation.
  • Michelle Yeoh is supervillain who is stealing babies for an evil sorcerer. Her scientist boyfriend has given her a cloak of invisibility. Anita and her husband are on her trail.
  • Maggie Cheung is Mercy, short for Mercenary. Dressed in leather bustiers and knee pads, she fights for the highest bidder with a motorcycle and a fistful of dynamite.
Director Johnny To keeps things stylish, with wafting smoke, shafts of light through the dusty air, and blizzards of blowing leaves, petals, paper, or birdcages full of babies, often in slow motion. The fight scenes a mostly wired, but exciting nonetheless. None of the women are martial artists - Yeoh was a dancer, Mui a popstar - but they can kick over their heads, and stunt doubles can handle the hard stuff.

If you've seen Irma Vep, you've seen some clips from this.

We had so much fun with this, I went back to re-watch So Close. It's hard to beat Corey Yuen's choreography, but my question is: Yeoh/Cheung/Mui or Shu Qi/Zhao Wei/Karen Mok?

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