John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow is essential for one simple reason: it is the first time Woo pairs up with Chow Yun-fat, and you can feel a whole new kind of movie star chemistry snap into place almost immediately. Chow’s Mark Lee is not just cool. He is mythically cool, the kind of figure that turns a crime melodrama into a legend just by walking into a room, coat swaying, eyes locked forward, unbothered by the fact that bullets will definitely be flying in the next five minutes.
Woo had already been working for years, but A Better Tomorrow is where the personality that would define The Killer and Hard Boiled starts to crystalize. The balletic gunplay, the brotherhood obsession, the romantic idea of honor in a world that does not deserve it, it is all here in early, slightly rough form. That roughness is part of the charm, even when the plotting gets clunky and the emotional beats veer into soap-operatic territory. Woo is reaching for something bigger than the story in front of him, and sometimes he gets it.
The setup is classic heroic bloodshed framework. Sung Tse-ho (Ti Lung) and Mark Lee (Chow Yun-fat) run a counterfeiting operation under triad boss Mr. Yiu, while Ho keeps his criminal life hidden from his younger brother Kit (Leslie Cheung), who is on the law enforcement track. Ho promises he will go straight after one last deal, then brings along an eager subordinate, Shing (Waise Lee), to Taiwan for a job that predictably goes sideways. Ho takes the fall, and everything fractures from there.
What makes the story work is not the mechanics, it is the emotional triangle. Ti Lung plays Ho with a weary dignity that keeps you invested even when the film is sprinting through plot. Leslie Cheung gives Kit a bratty, wounded edge that feels personal, not just “the straight-arrow brother” archetype. And Chow is the secret weapon, because Mark is the movie’s purest expression of loyalty and style, which is basically Woo’s whole gospel. When Mark goes to Taiwan for revenge and the violence turns operatic, you understand why audiences latched onto this as something brand new.
It is also a movie where the melodrama and the action are constantly wrestling for control. Ho’s attempts to reform, his job with an ex-con taxi boss named Ken (Kenneth Tsang), Kit’s anger and professional resentment, Shing’s slimy ambition, it is a lot of soap and a lot of machismo, sometimes in the same scene. The best Woo films later on have cleaner propulsion, even when they are just as emotionally heightened. Here, you can occasionally feel the seams.
Still, Woo shoots the hell out of it. The action has that “flying in formation” rhythm Woo became famous for, where movement, violence, and emotion all hit at once, like the characters are confessing their feelings with gunfire instead of words. The final dock sequence is a perfect example of that, a messy escalation into tragedy and redemption that is both over-the-top and weirdly sincere.
Watching it now, it also reads like a hinge point for Hong Kong action cinema. It is one of the foundational texts for gun-fu and the heroic bloodshed wave that followed. You can draw a straight line from the stylized shootouts here to decades of filmmakers borrowing the grammar, sometimes paying tribute, sometimes just ripping it off without the same emotional conviction. Woo’s later work refined the style, but A Better Tomorrow is the spark.
I also like the context that Woo and Tsui Hark were aiming at something more serious than the comedy-driven commercial lane that was dominant at the time, and that Woo was pulling inspiration from older crime cinema and even wuxia ideals of honor and chivalry. That tracks, because the best parts of the movie feel like Woo trying to transplant the soul of a swordplay epic into a modern gangster story. If you have seen Woo’s earlier Last Hurrah for Chivalry, you can feel him inching toward the language he would later perfect, just swapping blades for pistols.
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So yeah, it is not Woo’s tightest script, and it is not the one I would point to first if someone asked for the “best” John Woo movie. But as a cornerstone, and as a first glimpse of the Woo and Chow Yun-fat magic, it earns its reputation. It is a hugely influential film that still plays, even when it stumbles.
Score: 7/10
A Better Tomorrow (1986)
- Cast: Ti Lung, Chow Yun-Fat, Leslie Cheung, Emily Chu Bo-Yee, Waise Lee Chi-Hung, Tien Feng, John Woo, Sek Yin-Tsi
- Director: John Woo
- Genre: Action, Crime, Drama
- Runtime: 95 minutes
- Rated: R
- Release Date: August 2, 1986
- Movies Like A Better Tomorrow: Ballerina, Blade, The Gray Man
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