An action thriller about two brothers on opposite sides of the law, A Better Tomorrow was a smash hit in Hong Kong and helped birth the “heroic bloodshed” sub-genre. With Chow-Yun Fat’s performance as the third member of this triangle, the antagonistic but loyal gangster Mark, it was a role that cemented the actor as a star and his style – toothpick, sunglasses, trenchcoat – as a fashion icon. Director John Woo and producer Tsui Hark reunited for the sequel, A Better Tomorrow II (1987), and working tensions between them resulted in Woo and Hark editing their own versions of the film, eventually leaving it to someone else to smash them together. Yet, despite its clunky and convoluted plot, this sequel also became a success and is remembered particularly for its over-the-top climax, which set a blueprint for stylish action violence not only in Hong Kong cinema but internationally as well.
Plot-wise, there’s a lot of table setting as Ti Lung, former triad gangster who is in prison after the events of the last film, and his younger brother, Leslie Cheung, a cop, find themselves both working undercover to get close to a suspected importer (Dean Shek), an old associate of Ti Lung’s character. I was really struggling to remember if Shek’s character was a supporting player in the first A Better Tomorrow (he wasn’t), and was surprised to see him become a major focus (apparently one cause for the tensions between Woo and Hark). Due to a double-crossing frame-up by competitive gangsters, Shek’s character is exiled to New York, and this narrative strand brings to mind other crime epics like Once Upon A Time In America and Year Of The Dragon. This is where Chow Yun-Fat enters, which would be strange as his character Mark died at the end of the last movie. Well, not to worry because in a soap opera twist, Chow is playing his identical twin brother, Ken, running a restaurant in New York. And this is when things really start cooking, particularly the very memorable “eat my rice” scene where Ken doesn’t back down from a very unconvincing “Italian” white-guy mafia issuing threats over protection money.
A Better Tomorrow II even playfully references Mark’s style, as Ken makes fun of young punks trying to copy his brother’s get-up (only to eventually don it himself at the end, like a superhero putting on his cape and cowl). There’s even a background character who has created a series of illustrations and comic panels around the events of the first movie, furthering the story’s mythic approach to its themes of brotherhood. All the ensuing melodrama and cross-cutting sub-plots eventually pays off, as our heroes dress in black suits and shades, approaching a mansion swimming with henchmen, and proceed to wreak havoc in the name of revenge. The climax is blood-soaked mayhem with duelling hand-guns, shotguns, grenades, and even a samurai sword at one point, a masterful sequence encoded with the DNA for Woo’s later films like The Killer and Hard Boiled, but also future western films like Reservoir Dogs, The Matrix, John Wick etc.
The last twenty minutes cements A Better Tomorrow II as a classic, even if the road getting there was overly melodramatic and not as narratively satisfying or clear in its characterisation of the three leads as the first. Once again, Chow Yun-Fat walks away with the film with his suave charisma. Recommended.
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