John Woo directs Ti Lung, Leslie Cheung and Chow Yun-Fat in this Hong Kong action flick where a gangster returns comes home from jail to find the wrong boss in charge.

Nobody has burned up the screen in a supporting role quite like Chow Yun-Fat does in A Better Tomorrow. He doesn’t just steal focus in scenes, he isn’t merely handsome and cool. The entire movie shifts around him whenever he has a scene. And as good as Ti Lung and Leslie Cheung’s “brothers on opposite sides of the law” melodrama is this is the flick that made Yun-Fat and Woo action icons. The trademark two handed gunplay came about from Woo’s practical desire for his protagonists not to run out of bullets every five seconds. Heroic Bloodshed was born here… though The Killer and Hard Boiled were the more readily available titles in my local rental shops in the early Nineties. This made it to me just a little later during the Tarantino boom. Rewatching these first confident steps of the sub genre after all these years is undeniably exhilarating. Manly tragedy, volcanic emotions, slaughterhouse violence.

8

Perfect Double Bill: Hard Boiled (1992)

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