Iron Butterfly is a 1989 Hong Kong direct-to-TV police action drama trilogy directed by Johnnie To, revolving around two Hong Kong policewomen, Officers Roxanne (Tsui-Han Mak) and Elaine (Fiona Leung), and their investigations around criminal activities rampant around Hong Kong.
The first movie, Iron Butterfly (1989) details the two policewoman's first meeting, where they form an uneasy alliance with the Police Head of Narcotics Inspector Tsai (Anthony Wong) against a suspect attempting to traffic drugs into Hong Kong.
In the sequel, Iron Butterfly II: Alias (1990), Roxanne and Elaine are sent to Japan to investigate the Yakuza. However Elaine gets to befriend Yuan, falling in love with him, only to later find out Yuan is none other than an elite Yakuza informant and assassin.
The third and final installment, Iron Butterfly III: Tomorrow (1995) involves around a new character, elite hitman and Professional Killer, Lin-jian (Tony Leung Chiu-wai), who is on a killing spree in the triad underworld of Hong Kong because of a personal vendetta he has to settle.
After the third movie, both Tsui-Han Mak and Fiona Leung had their contracts with Milkyway terminated, and Johnnie To would move on to bigger, non-DTV projects. Without a proper DVD release and the original copies of the tapes left out of Milkyway Studio's archives, the entire trilogy is only available from those who owns them on VCDs back from the early 90s when the movies were still new. For Johnnie To's fans and completists, unfortunately the only ways possible to watch the movies is through streaming from online websites, from original owners of the movies on VCD who occasionally uploads obscure old dramas decades ago, preventing these movies from becoming a Missing Episode entirely.
This film series contains examples of:
- Action Girl: Roxanne and Elaine can both kick quite a lot of ass on their own, and take names efficiently using dual pistols.
- Actor Allusion: This isn’t the first time Tony Leung battles enemy mooks while walking down a corridor of enemy headquarters. Although this time he’s doing it alone without Inspector Tequila’s assistance.
- Badass in a Nice Suit: Lin-jian throughout the movie, where he takes names while wearing either white or black suits.
- Bloodier and Gorier: The entire series becomes progressively more violent, Darker and Edgier after each movie, with a significantly increasing bodycount.
- Bound and Gagged: Lin-jian gets tied to a wooden chair after getting captured alive by the mobsters. They immediately try to rough him up, including throwing him, together with the chair, against a wall, but then the chair breaks up in the process…
- Bulletproof Vest: Lin-jian wears a light one under his jacket, which saves him from being shot by Boss Cheung’s mooks during the corridor shootout.
- Demoted to Extra: Both Roxanne and Elaine gets their screentime pushed behind to make way for a new character, the elite hitman Lin-jian (played by Tony Leung) who gets plenty of action scenes and development all for himself.
- Drugs Are Bad: The main plot of the first movie. Both Roxanne and Elaine have to take down a drug syndicate about to take over Hong Kong.
- Enemy Mine: Yuan in the third movie eventually joins the two female leads, Elaine and Roxanne, because of his disdain towards his superior Boss Kurata's betrayal of the Yakuza's code of honour.
- Guns Akimbo: Roxanne in the boiler room gunfight ( and again during her Last Stand in the surveillance room), Lin-jian in the corridor shootout lifted from Hard Boiled, and also the assassin during the carpark shootout. Being this kind of movie, that’s expected.
- Hell-Bent for Leather: Lin-jian and Elaine both wears leather motorcycle jackets (his being brown, hers being black) for their final confrontation with Boss Cheung and the mobsters.
- Human Shield: Lin-jian briefly uses a thug as a meatshield in the climax after breaking out of the bonds the thugs trapped him in.
- Ironic Birthday: Lin-jian’s first onscreen hit? A mob boss celebrating his 60th birthday.
- Janitor Impersonation Infiltration: Lin-jian’s first kill is him shooting a mob boss, in the middle of his birthday party, while disguised as a waiter using his hand towel to conceal a pistol.
- Locking MacGyver in the Store Cupboard: Lin-jian gets captured alive by the mobsters, who proceeds to handcuff his hands to his back and leave him stranded in a bathroom. Cue Lin-jian using the tap and pipe to facilitate his attempt to break the cuffs from its chains. Although he does get his hands bloody in the process and needs to rub his sore wrists for a while.
- Mexican Standoff: Between Lin-jian, Boss Cheung, and the Dutch mob leader. It helps that Lin-jian is holding two guns at the same time, which assists him in being the final survivor when all three of them pulls the trigger simultaneously.
- Mission Control: While Lin-jian is taking names in a corridor shootout, Roxanne, watching him from a set of security cameras (after she shot the mook monitoring surveillance) gives him a hand by using a recovered walkie-talkie to instruct him positions of other mooks waiting to ambush him.
- Roxanne: "Two on your left! Another on your right! There's four behind that door!... (sees Lin-jian killing all the mooks on security camera)… Area is cleared, now turn left to exit! There’s nobody on either side, proceed slowly!..."
- No Medication for Me: Invoked; after the nightclub massacre where he barely survives, Lin-jian is shown retreating to his hotel room where he’s swallowing handfuls of Clobazam. He spat them out almost immediately when he realizes he’s losing control of himself, but immediately afterwards his epilepsy strikes and Lin ends up banging his head repeatedly on a wall. He manages to recover when he picks up those pills and swallows them back.
- No Seat Belts: Inverted. When a henchman had Lin-jian at gunpoint in the driver seat of his car, and is ordering Lin to drive, Lin instead puts on his seatbelt first, prompting the henchman to ask if he’s afraid of death. Lin-jian responds by driving like crazy at max speed down the street, making the henchman drop his gun before forcing the car to collide into the back of a construction vehicle carrying re-bars. Said henchman gets his face pulverized by the re-bars while Lin-jian survives barely, the seatbelt stopping him from being flung out in the collision.
- Professional Killer: Yuan, the Yakuza assassin in the second movie, and Lin-jian, the vigilante hitman in the third movie.
- Rotating Protagonist: While the female leads of each movies are constant, every new movie will introduce a new main protagonist into the picture.
- Sinister Surveillance: Invoked when Lin-jian infiltrates his way into Boss Cheung’s hideout, which is filled with security cameras at every turn. However, Roxanne infiltrates the hideout’s surveillance room, and turns the surveillance around to Lin-jian’s convenience just when the action starts becoming centralized around Lin-jian.
- Spanner in the Works: The mob has anticipated Lin-jian’s arrival at their headquarters, but they certainly did not anticipate Roxanne to infiltrate their hideout and assist Lin-jian. As such, she easily sneaks in, takes out the mobsters outside a lightly-guarded surveillance room, and makes Lin-jian’s infiltration a lot easier.
- Sword Fight: The climax of the second movie.
- Teeth-Clenched Teamwork: Roxanne and Elaine, but only for the first movie about how they met for the first time.
- Turn in Your Badge: Happens in the first movie when Roxanne and Elaine are ordered by their superiors to give in their badges when they're suspended from duty.
- Unwilling Suspension: In the final action scene, Fai gets hung from his heels on the roof of an abandoned building. The moment Lin-jian and Elaine tries to save him, the mob instead drops Fai all the way down, causing him to land with a fatal impact.
- Would Hurt a Child: The hostage taker in Tomorrow confronted by the police have no qualms trying to hack a child – his own son – to death when confronted by the police on a rooftop. He fails however, only to kill his wife instead, at which point he opts to step off a roof to his own demise instead.
