3 min. thoughts: A Better Tomorrow

Your boy is back with the Hong Kong action binge, on the menu today is the one that started it all for John Woo: A Better Tomorrow. This was the legendary director’s breakout film, bringing to audiences rich characters underneath a storm of bullets. 

“Gun-fu” was not in the lexicon of movies before John Woo. To put it in perspective, it would be two years until Die Hard would grace American theaters, thirteen years before The Matrix bent time, almost three decades before John Wick, and just a short while before Quentin Tarantino would fan boy over Woo in just about each one of his classics. (The plantation house shootout in Django Unchained has A Better Tomorrow II written all over it, but that’s for another post.)  

The sappy emotional beats of this film may not hit as hard the bloodshed, but the aura of the action is undeniable, with each frame dripping with style. 

It’s said that the late 80s streets of Hong Kong saw a trend of young men all wearing trench coats in emulation of the legendarily cool Chow Yun-fat. And God, nobody can smoke a cigarette like him. Even Tarantino himself said that after watching A Better Tomorrow, for about 3 months he would walk around in a long coat, aviator glasses, and matchstick perched on his lip. If you didn’t come for the story, you stayed for the style.