A Better Tomorrow (1986)
Directed by John Woo
A reforming ex-gangster tries to reconcile with his estranged policeman brother, but the ties to his former gang are difficult to break.
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What critics compared A Better Tomorrow to
Quentin Tarantino’s two Kill Bills are clearly referenced/homaged, as are the original Oldboy, the movies of Sam Peckinpah, the Infernal Affairs films (which served as the inspiration for Martin Scorsese’s The Departed) and the earlier Hong Kong thrillers made by John Woo, Tsui Hark and Ringo Lam (particularly the A Better Tomorrow movie trilogy).
Each geyser of blood gets its own glamor-lighting, lending the depravity a balletic opulence that insinuates that Evans really just wanted to create a splatter-house adaptation of "Miami Vice" or John Woo's "A Better Tomorrow" series.
Moscow-born director Ilya Naishuller probably grew up watching the “gun fu” movies of the great action-movie pioneer John Woo of “A Better Tomorrow” and “Hard-Boiled” fame.
If John Wick is director Chad Stahelski’s A Better Tomorrow , then its sequel is naturally A Better Tomorrow 2 , a less surprising but crazily amplified tour through the slaughterhouse.
Schwentke aims for a John Woo-esque celebration of clever staging and stylish action, but we’re miles from “Hard Boiled” or “A Better Tomorrow” as sequences frequently have a falsely anarchic, been-there-done-that staleness about them (one in which Frank slides out of a spinning car, firing bullets without missing a beat is a brief exception).
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Conducted back in 93, Woo talks about his desire to make a movie like "Lawrence of Arabia", and his admiration for David Lean.
Propelled by Joseph Koo’s memorable score that brilliantly integrated Peter Gabriel’s atmospheric piece of 1984’s Birdy (a little-seen drama starring then-young Matthew Modine and Nicolas Cage), the story — credited to John Woo, Chan Hing-Kai and Leung Suk-Wah — is a classic heroic bloodshed template.
The longtime Hong Kong director of such action films as "A Better Tomorrow," "The Killer," "Bullet in the Head," and "Hard-Boiled" came to Hollywood in the early '90s and made "Hard Target" and "Broken Arrow" before turning to "Face/Off."
But, as those who've seen the director's cult favorite Hong Kong movies like "A Better Tomorrow," "The Killer" and "Hard Boiled" can testify, Woo is also known for the sincerely sentimental underpinnings of his work.
In films like A Better Tomorrow (1986), The Killer (1989), and Hard-Boiled (1992), he has proven proficient at juggling props and sending hordes of trained Hong Kong stuntmen flying through the air with squibs of blood erupting from their chests.
Critics over the years have understood Woo’s commingling of stylised bloody gunfights and themes of loyalty, sacrifice and brotherhood as ‘Heroic Bloodshed’, which he first popularised with A Better Tomorrow (1986) and further cemented his reputation with Hard Boiled (1992).
In addition to featuring gun fu, essentially gun battles filmed with the extensive and elaborate choreography of a martial arts fight which he invented in his earlier film A Better Tomorrow (1986) (which in turn inspired filmmakers as varied as Luc Besson, Robert Rodriguez, and Quentin Tarantino), The Killer continued in the Hong Kong tradition of heroic bloodshed cinema.
John Woo, a name synonymous with action films.Woo practically revolutionized Hong Kong action with "A Better Tomorrow" which ushered in a new subgenre that many have dubbed "heroic bloodshed."
4 Stars (out of 4) Tweet Two-Gun Tango By Jeffrey M. Anderson Following up his monster hit A Better Tomorrow (1986) and its sequel A Better Tomorrow II (1987), director John Woo scaled back on plot and pumped up his extraordinary operatic visuals with The Killer.
His A Better Tomorrow got him noticed and the boost in financing became The Killer in 1989.
It's possible to try to detail the history of John Woo at the beginning of the Heroic Bloodshed movement in Hong Kong--how, with the first two A Better Tomorrows (the second of which features a genuinely astonishing amount of violence and the infamous subtitled malapropism "don't fuck on my family!"), he created in buddy Chow Yun-Fat a fashion/role model in the James Dean mold, and how he eventually left for Hollywood's golden shore at the service of Jean-Claude Van Damme and John Travolta (twice) and Nicolas Cage (twice).