IF Tri-Star represents the number of big names featured in this new movie, the producers got their sums wrong. As well as performers Leslie Cheung Kwok-wing, Anita Yuen Wing-yee and Lau Ching-wan, one name looms above all others: director-writer Tsui Hark.
But although this Lunar New Year comedy contains some hilarious moments, Tri-Star emerges as one of Tsui's more uneven films to date.
Tsui released three films in 1995, beginning with the Lunar New Year blockbuster The Chinese Feast; the 'teen idol' historical fantasy romance, Love in the Time of Twilight, and last Christmas's martial arts drama The Blade. Like its predecessors, Tri-Star displays flashes of the Tsui magic, overwhelmed by a confusing script.
Tri-Star could just as well have been named 'The Priest, the Prostitute, and the Policeman''. Leslie Cheung is a Catholic priest whose movie star looks make prospective brides want to abandon their humdrum grooms at the altar. Anita Yuen is the tart with an acid tongue and a heart of gold. And Lau Ching-wan is the eccentric cop who, while trailing the priest he suspects to be a criminal mastermind, somehow ends up with the cleric's man-hungry cousin (Katherine Hung Yan).
There are elements of Pymaglion and Sister Act as Cheung tries to reform Yuen and her colleagues by turning them into a pop band. But as the quality of the writing is never quite up to George Bernard Shaw, what emerges is a hodgepodge of gags and quips.
One of the best jokes is policeman Lau and his handsome-but-stupid sidekick (Chan Kam-hung) trying to spy on the harlots by eavesdropping through a bugging device in a salt shaker. Not the smartest place to put a microphone, as they soon learn. And there are plenty of snappy double-entendres whenever there is talk of sex, which is quite often. In the movie's funniest visual joke, Tsui borrows from the vampire genre in depicting an early morning wake-up call for the ladies of the night unaccustomed to daylight.