Mainlining Christmas

I heard this classic Hong Kong action movie was technically a Christmas film, so I decided to give it a rewatch, only to discover that wasn't possible. To rewatch a movie, you need to have seen it before, and I discovered a ways in I actually hadn't. I'd have sworn otherwise, but while I've seen numerous of the movie's various stunts and set pieces in clips, the rest was new to me. First, let's jump to the Christmas stuff, with the caveat there's very little. For the record, I'm going to defend this as a Christmas movie for the same reason I defended the label being attached to  Detective Bureau 2-3: Go to Hell Bastards! - films set at Christmas in a time and place where the holiday is afforded less importance tell us about how those cultures relate to Christmas. The holiday doesn't belong to Hollywood or the United States, and I think it would be a mistake to limit our viewpoint to the tropes, conventions, traditions, and assumption of our own nati...

Well, I probably shouldn't be reviewing this. First, a little background. Or in this case, lack thereof, because that's sort of the problem. I put this on having no clue what it was after seeing it on a list of science fiction films on Criterion. I'd seen virtually everything else on the list, but I'd never even heard of 2046, so I trusted it would be at least interesting and pressed play. The short version is that it is interesting, it is not  science fiction, but it was (surprisingly) a Christmas movie. Well, sort of a Christmas movie. I'll get to that. Also, it's not entirely not science fiction. I'll get to that, too. But first I want to highlight another aspect I wasn't ready for: it's the third movie in a trilogy. Sort of. I'm... not really going to get around to explaining that, because I'm still a little unclear on the details. Okay, my understanding is the main character of this appears in an earlier movie, and a minor character from...

Executioners is the sequel to The Heroic Trio, a Hong Kong superhero team-up movie built around three superheroines: Wonder Woman (not that  Wonder Woman), the Invisible Woman (not that Invisible Women, either), and Thief-Catcher (not that... no, wait, I think we're good here). I should note that I have no idea whether the monikers of Wonder Woman and The Invisible Woman correspond with the respective names of the Marvel and DC heroes in Cantonese. The characters don't seem at all connected, for what that's worth. It's also worth noting that both films were released in 1993. If you're wondering whether Executioners feels rushed as a result... yes, of course it does. Obviously. But we'll circle back to that. Let's talk a little about the heroines. Wonder Woman, played by Anita Mui, is essentially a masked ninja, more akin to Batman than Diana Prince. Of the three, she's the most unambiguously heroic. Thief-Catcher (Maggie Cheung) starts out more in the ve...