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A Better Tomorrow
Der City Wolf
Hong Kong 1986
produced by
Tsui Hark, John Woo for Cinema City, Film Workshop
directed by John Woo
starring Ti Lung, Chow Yun Fat, Leslie Cheung, Waise Lee, Emily Chu, Shing Fui-On, Kenneth Tsang, Tien Feng, Tsui Hark, John Woo, Kam Hing Ying, Shi Yangzi, Wang Hsieh
written by John Woo, Chan Hing-Ka, Leung Suk-Wah, music by Joseph Koo
review by
Mike Haberfelner
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Ho (Ti Lung) & Mark (Chow Yun Fat) are bigshots in the counterfeit
money business - unbeknowest to Ho's younger brother Kit (Leslie
Cheung), who goes to police academy to one day become an officer. One
day a deal goes wrong in Taiwan though, & Ho gets arrested when
helping Shing (Waise Lee) - one of his underlings - to escape. As a
warning not to squeal, the Taiwanese gangsters with whom Ho tried to
make a deal, shoot his dad (Tien Feng). To avenge his friend, Mark wipes
out the whole Taiwanese gang in return, but is seriously crippled when
doing so ...
3 years later: Ho is released from prison to find a changed world.
Kit wants to have nothing more to do with him, blaming the death of
their father on him, Shing has climbed the career ladder of the
counterfeit money organisation rapidly, now heading the organisation,
while crippled Mark is kept there merely as a low-life maintenance
worker. Ho decides to go straight to reconsile with his brother (which
doesn't work out), taking a job as a taxi-driver at Ken's (Kenneth
Tsang) taxi company that mainly hires ex-convicts, but his past
continues to get back at him: First Shing offers him a job out of
friendship as it sems, but as Shing & his men get more persistent
& violent it more & more becomes clear that Shing either wants
him back in to use the police connections Ho has through his brother
Kit, or wants to see him dead because he knows too much. Kit meanwhile,
who was actually after Shing's organisation, is both put off the case
& denied promotion because of his brother, & now is more keen
than ever to crack the case & arrest his own gangster brother. But
Shing's men set a trap for him. At the same time Mark is badly beaten up
& Ken's taxi-company thrashed. Now Mark & Ho decide to
get back at Shing, first stealing the magnetic tape on which the matrix
for forgeing dollars is stored, then proposing an exchange to Shing,
while actually giving the tape to Kit's wife Jackie (Emily Chu) &
tipping Kit off to the place of the exchange. It all ends in a massive
shoot-out at the docks, during which Mark dies a heroes' death, the
brothers are finally reconsiled, & Kit even allows Ho to shoot Shing
when he tells them he will come out of all this unscathed ...
A great, fast-paced action movie & a milestone in Hong Kong
cinema, since this movie - though not without predecessors - marks the
official beginning of the generic Hong Kong Heroic Bloodshed-genre
(meaning basically [non-martial arts] action gangster movies), as well
as bringing director John Woo's name finally to the map (he already had
been a director of undistinguished martial arts movies & comedies
for more than 10 years), & gave the career of former matinee-idol
Chow Yun Fat a rather different spin. A Better Tomorrow was the
first movie in which Woo could actually employ his very own style of
action directing, which would combine gunplay routines created by Sam
Peckinpah with concepts of martial arts-ballet (though no actual martial
arts or ballet are involved) the Hong Kong film industry itself had
perfected over the years, while telling stories that would combine
concepts from Jean Pierre Melville's movies (most notably Le Samourai)
with male bonding concepts from Woo's mentor Chang Cheh, while at the
same time also borrowing from yakuza movies from Seijun Suzuki as well
as Kinji Fukasaku. Over the next 5 years or so, Woo would turn out many
great pictures based on this explosive mix before moving on to Hollywood
& being degraded to turn out meaningless stuff like Mission
Impossible 2.
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