For John Woo, the Best Way to Get to A Better Tomorrow During Uncertain Times is Brotherhood

With the opening of 1986’s A Better Tomorrow, director John Woo and star Chow Yun Fat captured “cool” with skill and style that very few have been able to match since. A crew of gangsters, including life-long friends Sung-tse Ho (Ti Lung) and Mark (Chow), watch their counterfeiting operation produce sheet after sheet of faux dollars. As they inspect the freshly minted funny money, Mark takes a $100 bill, sets it ablaze, and uses the flames to light a cigar. Clad in a dashing longcoat and ultra-stylish Alain Delon-branded sunglasses, Mark (Brother Mark, to the younger gangsters who admire him) is a man who knows exactly who he is and how he moves through the world. When Ho needs someone to watch his back, Mark is his brother. When Mark needs someone to watch his back, Ho is his brother. As businessmen, as fighters, as brothers, Mark and Ho are the romantic gangster ideal made manifest.

The trick is that the romantic gangster ideal is a lie. Ho’s a loving brother to Mark, and to his biological brother Kit (Leslie Cheung), a sweet-hearted aspiring cop whose life is initially defined by adorable hijinks with his fiance Jackie (Emily Chu). But he’s given his life to a profession that values profit and power above all. Ho’s peers will happily try to take his elderly father (Tien Feng) hostage, and if that doesn’t work, kill him. His mentee, Shing (Waise Lee) wants to be the big man in the underworld, and doesn’t care whether he gets there by studying from Ho or stabbing him in the back. At the end of the day, power and ruthlessness appear to rule A Better Tomorrow’s world.

Ho taking the fall for Shing during a business deal gone sour is an admirable show of loyalty. Loyalty to your criminal cohort doesn’t count as a show of good character to law enforcement, and it doesn’t count for much among criminals who prioritize themselves above all else either. Ken single-handedly annihilating the crew who set Ho up is a staggering feat of martial valor. Martial valor cannot heal a maimed leg and integrity does not count for anything to an organization defined by an alleged survival-of-the-fittest code. Ho hides his criminal career from Kit because he wants his brother to stay on the straight and narrow and live the virtuous life Ho could not. Kit’s virtue drives him to despise Ho for his lies, deceptions, and indirect responsibility for their father’s murder. That hate twists Kit into a rabid cop who’s in the game for his own satisfaction, rather than his original goal of protecting people.

The world is changing for Ho, Mark, and Kit; for law enforcement and criminal enterprises; and for Hong Kong. Woo and producer Tsui Hark (UT Austin, Class of 1975!) made A Better Tomorrow two years after the United Kingdom agreed to hand over control of Hong Kong to China in 1997. Each of Woo’s five major post-breakout action pictures (beautifully restored by Shout Factory and running this month at the Austin Film Society) pays attention to both Hong Kong’s collective anxiety and his own anxiety about the handover and the seismic changes it would bring. In A Better Tomorrow, that anxiety manifests in its leads’ assorted neuroses. Mark hates himself for the sneering pity Shing and his cohort show him after his avenging Ho’s betrayal and capture leaves him disabled. Ho desperately wants to live an honest life after completing his prison sentence, and grapples with the lack of options available to a convicted criminal and Kit’s descent into hateful cruelty (his loathing Ho is understandable and to a point sympathetic. His beating Ho senseless for wanting to reconcile is horrifying). Kit is aware that his desperate need to prove himself more than the brother of a mafioso is poisoning his heart, but he’s gotten too used to hating Ho to see his brother’s genuine love and desire to atone. All three men have scarred hearts, and if there is to be any hope for them, they need to learn to carry those scars.

There is hope. Ho finds a community of fellow convicts who’re doing their damndest to live post-crime, and holds true to his desire to do the work atonement takes, no matter how unhappy. Mark tempers his self-loathing and egomania into doing right by his best friend, a commitment he’s willing to and does die for. Kit, after a lot of bloodshed, finally accepts that Ho’s desire to take responsibility for his actions and reconcile is his being the good brother Kit had once known him to be. Through their bonds, the heroes, to paraphrase A Better Tomorrow’s Chinese title, show their true colors. Their foes, meanwhile, fight for nothing but themselves and a life of superficial success. Shing doesn’t care about anyone but himself, and thus does not see how the bonds between Mark, Ho, and Kit will drive them to act for each other’s sake. His willful obliviousness seals his doom, and that doom is satisfying. 

A Better Tomorrow  is a classic of action cinema, a major artifact of pre-handover Hong Kong popular culture, and a glorious, glorious example of how ridiculously cool Chow Yun-Fat is. Mark’s got an ego to declare himself a god during an introspective moment with Ho, but the thing is that he’s good enough to back it up. 

A Better Tomorrow II is a worthy follow-up, with the major caveat that it is both messier (Woo and Hark had drastically different visions for the project, and clashed all the way through editing—Woo’s workprint was only rediscovered in 2024) and sillier. Chow’s Mark was the breakout performance in A Better Tomorrow, the reason to see the film. He was also, by the time the credits rolled, very, very dead. But A Better Tomorrow II needed Chow back alongside Lung and Cheung. 

How did Woo and Hark bring Mark back from death-by-hundreds-of-bullets? They didn’t. Instead, they introduced his heretofore unmentioned twin brother Ken (Chow), an amiable, easygoing, sometimes downright goofy chef living and working in New York after leaving his life of violence behind. Despite trading his guns for a wok and trying to keep the local youths from idolizing Mark, Ken is not a man to be crossed. When the wicked insist on violence, Ken answers their demands tenfold. His blasting his way out of an ambush while bodyguarding traumatized-but-slowly-coming-back-to-himself new protagonist Lung Sei (Dean Shek) stands as one of Woo’s great action scenes, even though it shares a film with II’s astounding climax.
If A Better Tomorrow was about the possibility of changing oneself for the better and the work necessary to enact that change, A Better Tomorrow II asks “how do you remain true to yourself when the world refuses to accept that you’ve changed?” It’s an interesting, thorny question, one hurt a bit by Shek being stuck with a mental health crisis and catatonic period that, put politely, is overly broad and by the leads spending too much of the film apart (perhaps a consequence of Woo and Hark’s falling out). It’s clumsier than its predecessor (or its successor, The Killer, which might be Woo’s masterpiece), but at its best (particularly the evolution of Ho and Kit’s repaired relationship) it’s a wonderful companion to its older sibling, complicating and enriching it.

And then there’s that climax—an eight minute symphony of gunplay, grenadeplay, sword-vs-axeplay and more where Ho, Ken, Lung and Ho’s buddy Ken (Kenneth Tsang) assault sneering gangster Ko (Kwan Shan)’s mansion fortress and blast their way through his army of goons. It continually escalates without tripping into monotony, gets chaotic without becoming incoherent. The major moments are cathartic and thrilling.
The first Better Tomorrow is a triumphant work of action cinema. The second is very messy and very enjoyable. Together, they make for both a good time at the movies and a fascinating introduction to the style and themes that woo would continue to refine during John Woo’s first Hong Kong period.

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