A Better Tomorrow II (Yingxiong Bense 2, 英雄本色2)
Director – John Woo – 1987 – Hong Kong – Cert. 18 – 105m – Workprint cut 140m
The first half **
The second half *****
Workprint cut *****
To continue the franchise, Chow Yun-fat returns playing the brother of his character in the first film, a New York restaurateur – 4K Restoration is out on 4K UHD and Blu-ray from Monday, 28th September
There’s something hugely endearing when Chow Yun-fat appears here, playing the brother of his character in the first film, insisting his name is not Mark but Ken. Nevertheless, he has on hand his late brother’s coat, with a few holes from bullets, to don in the closing scenes. Mark can’t possibly return having died at the end of the first film, and yet, to all intents and purposes, he’s back for this sequel!
The film as it appeared in release prints feels like little more than an excuse to have another big shoot out with Chow Yun-fat and others at the end, and you can feel Woo struggling as he tries to find a way of getting there without completely losing interest.
(Update: for struggling read; struggling with the editing required to get the film down to 105 minutes for cinema release. More on this later.)
Early on, there’s a ballroom dancing sequence in which the swirling dresses recall the Oxford prologue of Heaven’s Gate (Michael Cimino, 1980). Plot-wise, it’s a set-up for the murder of the central dancing protagonist Peggy (Regina Kent), the daughter of gangland boss Lung Sei (Dean Shek) with whom undercover cop Kit (Leslie Cheung (from Happy Together, Wong Kar-wai, 1997; Once a Thief, John Woo, 1991; A Chinese Ghost Story, Tsui Hark, 1987) is trying to ingratiate himself, and who goes insane as a result and is put in an institution.
The plot almost descends into farce, but never quite does, as Kit tries to conceal girlfriend Peggy from pregnant wife Jackie (Emily Chu), but it’s left to Ken to try and restore her father Lung’s sanity. The film lightens up whenever Chow appears – a run in with white US gangsters attempting to sign him and his restaurant up for a protection racket, his scenes trying to coax Dean Shek back to sanity, and the final gun-toting raid by Chow, Shek and Ti Lung (from Drunken Master II, Liu Chia-Liang, 1994; Shaolin Temple, Chang Cheh, Wu Ma, 1976) on a gangster’s mansion.
Also noteworthy is the scene where Kit is fatally shot by an assassin as his wife gives birth in the hospital, loosely anticipating the ward full of babies at the end of Hard Boiled (John Woo, 1992).
Arrow’s A Better Tomorrow trilogy disc release devotes two discs to A Better Tomorrow II, the second disc containing John Woo’s workprint of the film which runs an extra 35 mins. It’s a revelation.
Now, as I understand it, feature films often arrive at a very long rough assembly from which the film will be cut into its final form. There may well be a lot of waste in that original assembly: sometimes less is more, and the act of taking scenes or shots out and perhaps reordering them can often result in a better film. There’s an idea among many film fans that longer is always better, but that’s not always the case. Over the years, this writer has certainly seen too many overlong films that could have been improved no end by judicious pruning. However, sometimes too much can be cut, and the film can suffer badly.
Cinema City, who financed the film wanting to duplicate the box office of its predecessor, insisted John Woo cut the length down, but in the process of his doing so some scenes were removed in their entirety and others pruned, severely curtailing their emotional impact. Suddenly you understand why the theatrical release version stumbles and can’t seem to find its way in places – it’s because great swathes of it have been removed or pruned, and various elements that the film requires to work or resonate are, quite simply, no longer present.
Some of this is sequences which have been trimmed and, while on paper they largely still make sense, they have lost much of their cinematic power in the process; some of this is other sequences that have been trimmed and shorn of plot or thematic developments; some of this is entire sequences which have gone. Where the theatrical release version feels disjointed and thrown together, the workprint flows better and makes a lot more sense. It’s the difference between a highly flawed sequel and a full blown John Woo gangster epic.
Yes, it’s a workprint, so certain shots and scenes aren’t graded properly and a very few scenes look way too dark. But that is a small price to pay to see this far superior version of the film. Arrow are to be congratulated for including it as part of this box set.
A Better Tomorrow II 4K Restoration is out on 4K UHD and Blu-ray as part of the A Better Tomorrow trilogy from Monday, 28th September 2026.
The 105 min Restoration version recently played as part of Bullets and Brotherhood: The Films of John Woo at BFI Southbank from Friday, 3rd July to Friday, 31st July 2026.
Trailer: