The true colours of heroes and the birth of a myth…
Great films can define a genre, while others are able to create its core conventions. John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow belongs to the latter category. Watching it today, you can still feel the seismic shockwaves it sent through Hong Kong cinema — the slow-motion ballets of gunfire, the soaring tragic score, the long coats billowing like wings and the melodrama threaded through action. This is where heroic bloodshed was born.
Released in 1986, the film arrived at a moment of exhaustion in Hong Kong action cinema. The wuxia tradition was calcifying, the gangster film had grown formulaic, and Woo’s own career had stalled: after a decade of films-for-hire that included standout works such as Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979) alongside a long stretch of comedies to which he felt little creative connection, he had grown disillusioned. The man who would become the defining action filmmaker of his generation had been declared — as he later revealed — box office poison. What rescued him was the loyalty of Tsui Hark, who had long been sitting on a project inspired by Patrick Lung Kong’s 1967 crime drama The Story of a Discharged Prisoner. Bringing Woo into his newly formed Film Workshop, Hark proposed it as the basis for a new film. Woo took that foundation and built something entirely his own, infusing the material with his ideas about honour, heroism, and the wuxia conventions transposed into a modern world.
A Better Tomorrow tells the story of Ho (Ti Lung), a counterfeiter working for the triads whose younger brother Kit (Leslie Cheung) is training to become a police officer in deliberate ignorance of his sibling’s life. Before retiring, Ho’s last deal goes wrong, and everything unravels from there: he is imprisoned, his companion Mark (Chow Yun-fat) is crippled trying to protect him, and Kit discovers the truth and cannot forgive him. In a story of loyalty, betrayal, redemption, and the impossibility of going back, the setup appears elemental and the logic an ancient one. But it is the sensibility and acuity with which Woo tells it that made it so special.
On the surface the film opens in a lighter register, with an almost comedic tone, but that is only apparent. The score announces a different mood long before the plot does: the melancholy threading through even the early scenes is already laying the groundwork. The real shift arrives just past the first half hour, with a scene that announces A Better Tomorrow as something new.
Mark enters a restaurant with a woman on his arm; the build-up music is playing. The space becomes a stage, characters entering and exiting through specific vectors. There is a moment of stillness before the chaos, where Mark assesses the room. And then the door opens, the music stops, and what follows is a choreographed action scene — the percussion of multi-layered gunfire with rhythm and cadence. The dual-wielding pistols create choreographic complexity, while slow motion builds anticipation. Woo had looked at the wuxia tradition, at the Chinese knight wielding swords, and translated it into gunfire: the pistol as blade, action and reaction shown in the same frame, the target physically displaced by impact, the body made to register the weight of what is happening to it. The sound design completes the invention: in the interview available for this edition, Woo has described combining multiple distinct sounds into a single gunshot to produce something entirely new, distinct from the gunfire everyone else was using. When Mark finally sets the weapons down, the music returns, quieter and more melancholic; a hint of everything still to come. This moment inaugurated what would become known as gun-fu: the fusion of wuxia choreography with firearms, the action sequence as moral performance rather than mere spectacle.
But what defines the film is not the action alone. The real grammar of A Better Tomorrow — as it is for every Woo film that followed — is sentiment: the bonds between men, and what sustaining them demands. The film’s emotional architecture is triangular. At its centre is Ho, and Ti Lung’s performance is the spine of the entire picture. His is a restrained, almost classical portrayal of a man trying to recover a dignity that cannot be bought back; every scene he shares with Kit carries the specific weight of guilt that has no available resolution. Opposite him, Leslie Cheung’s Kit is not simply the angry younger brother; he is a man who has constructed his entire identity around distance from Ho’s world, and whose refusal to forgive is itself a form of inverted love. The tragedy is that Kit’s moral rigidity and Ho’s desire for redemption are mirror images of the same wound. Woo makes this visible in one of the film’s most quietly devastating passages: a stretch of parallel editing, barely two minutes long, that cuts between Ho in prison and Kit in police training. No dialogue carries the weight; the montage does it alone, the rhythm of cuts building an unbearable symmetry between two men moving further apart.
And then there is Mark. Chow Yun-fat becomes the film’s soul and its icon. His trajectory into this role mirrors Woo’s own: best known until then for television melodrama and romantic leads, this film represented a radical reinvention that neither man could have fully anticipated. What Chow brings to Mark is something that cannot be fully written in a script: a quality of cool that reads, on closer inspection, as a form of continuous grief. Mark is committed to his own values — genuine, passionate, stubbornly light — even as the world around him rejects and marginalises men like him. The long coat, the toothpick, the sunglasses became the iconography of an entire genre and generation precisely because they were never merely stylistic. They were the embodied expression of something interior, deeply felt by the audience outside the picture.
The soundtrack, composed by Joseph Koo and featuring Leslie Cheung’s vocals, is among the most recognisable in Hong Kong cinema: a few notes are enough to place you inside the film’s emotional world. Woo and Koo use the score not to underline feeling but to carry it forward, the melancholy establishing from the first reel a tone that the narrative will eventually justify.
And yet, this is Woo still developing his style, not fully occupying it. The melodrama occasionally tips into excess, and some transitions feel tentative compared to his later masterworks; the film’s one conspicuous flashback feels awkwardly placed, a rare structural misstep in an otherwise confident narrative. What keeps it from five stars is this occasional roughness and the still not fully polished action scenes. But the foundation is unshakable. You can feel Woo still finding his full voice, but this does not diminish what the film achieves.
What remains when the credits roll is not just an action film, but the blueprint of a moral philosophy: the insistence that loyalty is the only reliable structure in a corrupt world; that the bonds between men can outlast every institution that betrays them. A Better Tomorrow is the foundation stone, and its architecture would reach its fullest expression years later in films like The Killer, Bullet in the Head, or Hard Boiled — but the influence it cast over generations of filmmakers and audiences alike, from Hong Kong to Hollywood, has never fully receded.
A Better Tomorrow is in UK cinemas from 26 June, and available as a limited edition 4K UHD + Blu-ray from Imprint Films (Imprint Asia #44), as part of the A Better Tomorrow Trilogy hardbox collection alongside A Better Tomorrow II (#45) and A Better Tomorrow III: Love & Death in Saigon (#46). Limited to 1,500 copies.
Home media details
Distributor: Imprint Films (Australia)
Edition: Limited Edition 4K UHD + Blu-ray (2026)
For this review, I screened the Imprint Films Limited Edition 4K UHD + Blu-ray (Imprint Asia #44). The new 4K restoration from the original camera negative, presented in Dolby Vision at the original 1.85:1 aspect ratio, is excellent: grain structure is well-preserved, and the image holds up well even in the film’s darker, rain-slicked sequences. The Cantonese LPCM 2.0 Mono track is clean and dynamic, with Joseph Koo’s score given room to breathe alongside the film’s distinctive gunfire. The extras are genuinely informative. The new interview with John Woo is the highlight: he speaks candidly about the years of commercial failure that preceded the film, the debt he owes to Tsui Hark, and the personal investment that went into the script. The interviews with producer Terence Chang and screenwriter Chan Hing-ka add useful production context, and the Code of Bullets: Part 1 archival featurette traces the formal revolution of the gunfight sequences in useful detail. The one absence worth noting is that, unlike its two companions in the set — which include the long-lost workprint of A Better Tomorrow II and the Taiwanese cut of A Better Tomorrow III — this disc offers no alternate version of the film. Given the richness of the production history, an extended cut or even a selection of deleted scenes would have been welcome.
About the author
