The title of this John Woo 1986 action classic is taken from the 1985 Taiwanese charity single Tomorrow Will Be Better, released in the spirit of the west’s Live Aid and a huge pan-Asian hit. It is poignantly performed in one scene by a choir of sweet schoolchildren; their innocence is, of course, in counterpoint to the blood-drizzled bad guys, but it also speaks to the yearning of some of these criminals to redeem themselves: “Let our smiles show off our pride of youth / Let us look forward to a better tomorrow.”
Perhaps, with the perspective of 40 years, we can now see more clearly why John Woo’s movies are so addictive. Not merely for the much discussed, much imitated “balletic” gunplay sequences, but for the fierce, unapologetic streak of melodrama and sentimentality. Family is everything, but that doesn’t mean endorsing crime families.
Hong Kong action star and Shaw Brothers veteran Ti Lung plays Ho, a gangster who works for a triad syndicate counterfeiting US dollar bills using state-of-the-art tech and then selling them abroad. Chow Yun-fat plays his best buddy Mark (his gangland “brother”) and together these swaggering wiseguys have a very good thing going, though they are irritated by an oleaginous, ambitious young wannabe triad named Shing (Waise Lee), who is always flattering them. But Ho has a terrible secret: his adored kid brother Kit (Leslie Cheung) is a fresh-faced police cadet – and far from gloating over this possible informant-insider in law enforcement, Ho is crippled with guilt and plagued by demands from his ailing father that he should abandon his criminal career so as not to embarrass young Kit.
When a deal in Taiwan goes wrong, Ho is imprisoned for three years. Mark is permanently injured by a gunshot wound to the leg after taking terrible vengeance on the duplicitous villains who set them up. And when Ho finally gets out of jail and returns to Hong Kong, he finds Mark no more than a beggar, humiliatingly working for Shing, who is now the smugly supreme top dog. Reclaiming his honour as an honest man will require Ho to make a reckoning with his criminal “brother” Mark as well as his actual brother Kit; the whole concept of fraternal loyalty is at the film’s heart. Woo himself has a cameo as the Taiwanese cop determined to take the gang down.
There are some spectacular firefight extravaganzas here. Perhaps only Woo would insist on a shootout taking place at what looks like a dockside petrol station, which moreover has great big drums of diesel fuel lying about the place. Woo, however, also loves broad emotion, broad acting and very broad comedy. When Kit’s sweetly respectable girlfriend Jackie (Emily Chu) is late for her cello audition in front of a stern panel of music-school examiners, Kit joins her to hurry the proceedings along – and in a chaotic, clumsy melee worthy of Laurel and Hardy, Jackie’s cello case hits a pregnant examiner in the stomach. There is nothing subtle about A Better Tomorrow, yet it is fierce, vehement and runs on rails.