Movie Of The Fortnight: A Better Tomorrow Part II (1987)
John Woo directs Leslie Cheung, Chow Yun-Fat and Lung Ti in this Hong Kong gun-fu sequel where a saucy restauranteur teams up with a police officer and his ex-con brother to avenge the death of a friend’s daughter.
Has so much melodrama to get through before we get to a crew of cool guys in cool suits blowing away storms of stuntmen in a blaze of bullets. Yet the fast forward mawk and soap opera is just as dizzying and dazzling as the heroic bloodshed. Love it!
This is what I wrote about it in a Woo / Yun Fat retrospective back in the day for Kamera.co.uk…
“Encouraged by the critical and commercial success of this partnership, Woo set out to make what was destined to become the masterpiece of the genre, The Killer (1989), starring Chow as the eponymous assassin. Tsui Hark had other plans, deciding to reunite the ensemble of A Better Tomorrow for a sequel, despite the fact that Chow’s character had died in a hail of bullets before the credits rolled. Characterised by a mish-mash of subplots, new characters and extraneous sequences, A Better Tomorrow II (1987) was clearly the work of a creative director with little concentration on the work in hand.
Apart from during his now-trademarked sequences of orchestrated pandemonium, the sequel sees Woo grudgingly marking time. The director only seems to come alive during Chow’s Lazarus-style resurrection. The narrative conceit that facilitates the star’s return is the old “estranged twin brother” routine, but the way in which Woo treats this cliché is the film’s sole moment of directorial invention. We are reminded of Chow’s late incarnation by a series of comic book-esque paintings that recreate the indelible images of him from the original film. We then see the familiar looking Ken who, unlike his doppelganger, is alive and well in New York City. Woo takes the visual grammar of the comic book, a literary form which sees its protagonists coming back to life month after month, and uses it to reintroduce his favourite star in a sequence which manages to be inventive, touching, mythologizing and direct.
Chow, given this new lease of life, proceeds to treat the rest of the film as a kind of long-winded joke, happily laughing through the expositionary dialogue and playing up to the camera. His upstaging antics are matched only by Steve McQueen’s deliciously distracting hat-fiddling in The Magnificent Seven (1960) – perhaps appropriate given the heavy influence of westerns on John Woo’s filmmaking. Woo also steals a motif from Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (1967): Chow’s character episodically assumes items from his dead brother’s wardrobe of shades, trenchcoat and guns as the story progresses, in the same way that The Man With No Name pieces together his poncho, cheroot and mule during the progress of his third adventure.”
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Perfect Double Bill: A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon Part III (1989)
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Bobby Carroll's Movie Diary 