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Three Chinese beauties go up against a horrible villain called The Evil Master in this 1993 Hong Kong action movie. The Evil Master is a super powered supernatural creature who is kidnapping babies, in order to make one of them, the next emperor. The rest will be turned in his minions. Unless he can be stopped by three young ladies who must band together and fight.

The Heroic Trio is your basic Batman rip off. The police are ineffectively trying to find missing babies and they can’t seem to get anywhere. Only when one of the women shows up and acts like a superhero does anything get accomplished. This movie is meant to be viewed like a comic book. There are a couple of serious moments but overall this reminds me of the campiness of the old Batman TV series.
The talented and entertaining, Anita Mui, plays the intelligent Shadow Fox, who is the wife of the Police Inspector. Shadow Fox has a recurring nightmare, in which, she tries in vain to save her sister who is trying to climb up a rope along a mountain. Some jerk standing at the top of the mountain yells at the sister to keep climbing the rope to prove strength and willpower. Unfortunately she isn’t strong enough and Shadow Fox, as a little girl, grabs her hand but can’t hang on. Mui worked with Jackie Chan in Rumble in the Bronx and she shows that she can fight and perform wire stunts with the best of them.

The next hero, Michelle Yeoh, also starred with Jackie Chan and actually upstaged him in Supercop. She was also a Bond girl and is clearly the strongest of the three female superheroes. She plays the Invisible Woman who works for the Evil Master and is the one kidnapping the babies with the help of an invisible cloak. Invisible Woman is actually Shadow Fox’s sister and eventually she has to make a choice to keep assisting the Evil Master or fight back.

No stranger to Hong Kong action movie fans is, Mercy, played by the always sexy Maggie Cheung who was in several Jackie Chan movies including his best work from the 80’s the Police Story series. Mercy is a mercenary who helps out the bumbling police force who couldn’t even rescue a kitten from a tree. She may not be the brightest but she is the most vocal and is willing to do the right thing at any cost. Mercy does have the funniest lines. Together, Shadow Fox, Invisible Woman, and Mercy have to rely on each other for different strengths and to balance out weaknesses.

The Heroic Trio does have some interesting girl on girl fighting. There is a lot of wire work involved that recalls 70’s Shaw Brothers. However, it is not until the three are forced to fight together against the Evil Master that the movie really gets going. The end fight is good and it answered one of my late night nagging questions, can skeletons use kung fu to fight with? The answer is yes, providing the skeleton has enough supernatural powers. The main problem with the Heroic Trio is that it really drags almost to a dead stop in the middle. You don’t really care about the girls or why they are fighting. You don’t care about the Evil Master because he is not much of a villain. He just sets around in his fantasy liar waiting to fight someone like the final boss in a video game. If the Evil Master would have kidnapped one of the males that the girls liked and tortured him, that would have made him evil. He does nothing. He is such a total slack that even if he gets his butt kicked, you don’t really care. Just like watching a schoolyard fight between two strangers. If only the script had some backstory, the Evil Master would have been a stronger character instead of being so lame. The girls, while attractive, especially when Mercy prances around in tight pants, really don’t have strong characters. For superheroes to work, you need to flesh them out or you just get two dimension stock characters that makes for boring entertainment. With all the talent that the Heroic Trio had, it could have been much better if a little more time was spent in preproduction, particularly the script. The actions scenes are good and some of the dialogue is witty. However the slow pace and other issues make this so dull.

Overall Rating

2 out of 5 Stars