The Cinematheque

“The climax of A Better Tomorrow II, an all-out assault on a gangster’s mansion, is one of the most incendiary gun battles in cinema … The most striking feature of [the film] is its display of popular entertainment’s shameless ingenuity.”

David Bordwell, Planet Hong Kong

According to director John Woo, ​“The only thing I consider religious in my movies is my understanding of love.” Even in a film where he lost final cut, and where the confident tone of the first A Better Tomorrow is mixed with cross-purpose comedy and an elaborate amnesia plot, this rings true. How else, beyond a director’s divine intervention, to explain the return of Woo’s alter-ego star Chow Yun-fat to the series as Ken, the twin brother(!) of the first movie’s hero Mark, who’s discovered as a hapless line cook somewhere in New York. A Better Tomorrow II begins as a policier, with Kit (Leslie Cheung) going undercover only to run into his brother (Ti Lung), paroled and doing his own top-secret work in Hong Kong’s criminal underground. The sequel, uneven though it may be, hits several high marks for the series: iconic moments (a thumbs-up, a stairway shoot-out), ludicrously broad antics (involving food), and moving grace notes (courtesy of Cheung’s performance).