Its odd how some gangster films from the 1970s and 1980s have dated more than those made in the 1930s and 1940s, probably because the pacing and the snappy dialog crammed into 80 minutes wears much better than long stretches of attitude and out-of-date clothes and second- rate music.
The main reason folks seem to watch John Woo is for his grasp of kinetic gun play and maximum explosive violence, and that said, he does it infinitely better in his later films, mainly Hard Boiled, in which the last 30 minutes is absolute dynamite. There are a few scenes in A Better Tomorrow worth wading through in this film, and Chow Yun-Fat is persuasive as a silent gun man with a strong personal code, but you just want to smack the kid brother, whose petulance and whining grows tiresome after about ten minutes, and the final shootout, even though dozens of whirling bodies go flying through the air, is fairly predictable to seasoned viewers. This is a good film to watch to see where Woo was grounded, but I think his mature work shines in comparison
The main reason folks seem to watch John Woo is for his grasp of kinetic gun play and maximum explosive violence, and that said, he does it infinitely better in his later films, mainly Hard Boiled, in which the last 30 minutes is absolute dynamite. There are a few scenes in A Better Tomorrow worth wading through in this film, and Chow Yun-Fat is persuasive as a silent gun man with a strong personal code, but you just want to smack the kid brother, whose petulance and whining grows tiresome after about ten minutes, and the final shootout, even though dozens of whirling bodies go flying through the air, is fairly predictable to seasoned viewers. This is a good film to watch to see where Woo was grounded, but I think his mature work shines in comparison