Keeping up with a legacy — more violence, less coherence, but a sequel that earns its own kind of honour…
Being born in the shadow of a landmark film is never easy. A Better Tomorrow II had the misfortune of following one of the most influential action movies ever made in Hong Kong. The sequel feels the pressure and the fatigue that many sequels do: forced, uneven, and at times ridiculous. And yet, it is also extremely enjoyable, packed with sequences that push John Woo’s style further than the original ever did. It does not fully succeed as a coherent whole, but as a collection of virtuoso set pieces and melancholy grace notes, it offers its own kind of reward.
Released in 1987, the film arrived carrying an impossible weight. A Better Tomorrow had broken every Hong Kong box office record, launched a genre, and given a generation its mythology. Woo, who initially had no interest in making a sequel, arrived at the film without the urgency that had powered the original. The first problem A Better Tomorrow II faces is one difficult to solve: Mark is dead. The figure who had become the defining icon of Hong Kong popular culture had been killed at the end of the first film. A sequel without him was unthinkable, and a sequel with him required the invention of a twin brother that nobody had thought to mention before: Ken. In addition to that, the behind-the-scenes friction is written into the film’s DNA. By that year, the collaboration between John Woo and producer Tsui Hark had soured. The two disagreed fundamentally on where the film’s emotional centre should lie. This friction produced a theatrical cut that feels, in places, like two films edited together by a third party, which is in part what happened. Woo wanted to develop the relationship between Ken and Kit (the emotional counterpart to the Ho/Mark bond of the first film) and shot several scenes to that end; Hark wanted them removed. The result is a film in which those scenes are present only as absence: sketched, introduced, and then withdrawn, as though glimpsed through a door that keeps closing. Even without knowing the troubled production history, you can feel something missing.
And yet Chow, with his effortless charisma, differentiates Ken just enough while still winking at the audience. Ken is not Mark, and they were carefully differentiating the characters, just to spark the performance with bits and pieces of fanservice: when Chow grins with toothpick in mouth and dons the sunglasses, you cannot help but think “Mark Gor!”. The self-referentiality goes further: young Chinese-Americans in New York dress like Mark; a comic strip based on the first film appears on screen. It is almost ridiculous, but also strangely affectionate: the film acknowledging the cultural phenomenon it has become, and in doing so they turn the weight of the first film into something the second can actually use.
One of the film’s most interesting structural ideas is geographical. Where A Better Tomorrow moved between Hong Kong and Taiwan without ever fully pressing on the weight of its locations, A Better Tomorrow II builds a genuine tension between New York and Hong Kong, between the idea of America as escape and the recognition of Hong Kong as home. Lung’s trajectory, from exile to avenger, carries a displaced political anxiety that the film handles with a precise parallelism: from the failure of the American dream as a quietly felt refrain, to the impossibility of truly leaving the motherland. And the same can be said for Ken. The American dream is not simply unavailable to these characters; it actively fails them, leaving them with no choice but to return to the Hong Kong that is itself a home of corruption and violence, but their home nonetheless; and this gives the film’s insistence on loyalty and belonging a quietly desperate undertone.
Despite the structural flaws and excesses, certain scenes are so high-level that they hold up the entire picture. The final thirty minutes are masterful, and the action sequences unambiguously surpass those of the first film. Without spoiling the fate of key characters in the second half of the movie, the escalation that follows — a sustained, bullet-riddled siege in a sprawling villa — is gun-fu at its finest. The action is more fluid, more inventive, more brutal than in the first film. It is here that you see Woo not just repeating himself but refining his vocabulary.
The soundtrack, inevitably, is another cornerstone. Joseph Koo returns, and the central theme of the sequel, Running towards the Future (奔向未來日子) — a poignant and propulsive Cantopop ballad sung by Leslie Cheung — rivals, perhaps even surpasses, the first film’s signature song. The lyrics ache with loss as the words speak of racing towards a future that cannot yet be seen, which is exactly the condition of each character in the film. For anyone who loves Cantopop, this track lingers long after the credits roll. The soundtrack, instrumental and non, is placed at precisely the right moments, creating an emotional backdrop that elevates even the most over-the-top violence.
A Better Tomorrow II is not the equal of what it follows. Its structure is fractured, its most interesting relationships left undeveloped, its emotional architecture unfinished. But it is not a failure; it is more of a collision: between two directors’ visions, between commercial obligation and artistic intent, between the myth of a dead man and the character invented to replace him. What survives that collision is substantial enough to make it worth defending. The legacy may be too large to carry. But the attempt is not without its own kind of honour; this sequel is worth remembering.
A Better Tomorrow II screens as part of BFI’s Bullets and Brotherhood: The Films of John Woo season. It’s also 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 4K UHD disc from the Imprint Asia box set. The new 4K restoration from the original camera negative (Dolby Vision, 1.85:1) is solid: fine detail is sharp, grain is natural, and the colour timing does justice to Woo’s moody interiors. The Cantonese LPCM 2.0 Mono soundtrack is clean and dynamic. The real treasure is the bonus Blu-ray disc containing the workprint cut of A Better Tomorrow II (Cantonese mono, standard-definition inserts). While the quality is rough, the alternate footage — nearly 40 minutes of extended and deleted scenes — offers a fascinating alternate vision of the film, revealing character beats and narrative threads that were excised from the theatrical version. The new interviews with John Woo and Frank Djeng add useful context to the troubled production.
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