The Heroic Trio

 The Heroic Trio is a Hong Kong superhero movie from 1993 that I remembered pretty fondly, mostly for being absolutely batshit crazy. And yeah, that's still pretty much the main takeaway. 

 Here's a small list of what you can expect out of it:
 - A house viewing devolves into someone jumping out a second floor window, using the tendrils of ivy outside both as a Tarzan-style brachiation aid and as a lasso to catch a thief.
 - An invisible assailant steals two babies from police custody, and a female superhero comes to stop it; There's running across electric wires, a falling baby (a running theme throughout the movie; not all of them survive), and all sorts of crazy stunts.
 - The invisible assailant, who turns out to be Michelle Yeoh, reaches an evil underground lair and is gratuitously attacked by a crazed kung fu guardian.
 - We meet this guy:

 - When a child falls from a (different) tall building, someone jumps after her, falls faster and rescues both the kid and her cute kitten.
 - Some criminals hole up in a chemical plant with hostages; All the police can do is look on helplessly while they gun down a helpless woman. Then a mercenary shows up, puts some dynamite in an open empty barrel, sits on it as if it were a horse, and uses the explosion to vault into the second floor and take out all the criminals with her trusty shotgun. It's just as silly/amazing as it sounds.
 - A crazy man goes into a maternity ward to, in his words, "kill all the babies". He's foiled.

 And all of this happens within the first half hour! And I didn't even mention all the cheesy melodrama, corny comedy scene setting with the police and other random shit.

 The plot involves some sort of undead eunuch trying to set up an Emperor for China by kidnapping a bunch of babies. He's coercing Invisible Woman (Michelle Yeoh) to do his evil bidding, and is opposed by straight-laced superhero Wonder Woman (Anita Mui) and fun-loving mercenary Thief Catcher (Maggie Cheung). As the title of the movie implies, the Invisible Woman may have a change of heart at some point.
 It's a Hong Kong take on American four-color comic stories, and it does a pretty good job of merging both types of madness. The results are never boring, but unfortunately the childish plotting, whiplash-inducing tone swings, wall-to-wall posturing, extremely broad humor, mawkish melodrama, and forced camp does kind of bring it down a few notches.

 It just doesn't ever pause to catch a breath. Everything is always dialed up to eleven; the constant barrage of heightened drama gets tiring, and the lack of anything substantive to latch onto -and the sense that the writer (Sandy Shaw) is just making it up as she goes along- makes it almost impossible to care about any of the events or characters. Even when it's a cute, doomed baby.

 Mui and Yeoh unfortunately don't get to do a lot with their characters - Mui is the earnest, glamorous, properly heroic one, and Yeoh gets the lion's share of all the angsty melodrama. They both look amazing, though. Cheung plays the sassy one - bad news is that she gets most of the shitty comedy bits, but at least she looks like she's having fun.
 The film is directed by Johnnie To, but this is a very, very different To than the one who'll eventually direct Election or The Mission; here he just piles on the scenes without any concern for pacing or coherence. It looks great, if you can get over the overtly campy tone. At least there's ample warning as the movie opens with a reference to the sixties batman series.

 And there's a lot of cool stuff. There's a bit where a motorcycle is driven off a wall and hurled, spinning horizontally, at a bad guy wielding a weapon straight out of Master of the Flying Guillotine. The villain's final form is an organic take on The Terminator's skeletal robot, one that opens its ribcage, traps Michelle Yeoh in it, and then puppeteers her to fight her teammates.
 The action is good, but except for a couple of fights it's the less exciting style of Hong Kong fights: pirouettes and twirly acrobatics rather than intricate combat, with a focus on things looking cool and fast, not so much on detail. Lots and lots of wire-assisted stunts, a lot of which look pretty silly but are a lot of fun.

 It's completely nuts in a way that works for it just as much as it works against it; I still like it a lot, but it's a hard movie to recommend to people who aren't used to this sort of thing.