With the Hong Kong martial arts epics of the last two years going out of style, the filmmakers from the free city seem more eager than ever to discover the next trend that will hit the big time, with the primary suspect being a revival of the “Heroic Bloodshed” gunplay pictures that were so popular during the early Eighties. Perhaps desperate to get a jump on the competition, quirky director Wong (Royal Tramp) Jing, has decided what better way to bring back the genre than by making a sort of quasi-sequel to the movie that started it all — John Woo’s seminal gangster classic A Better Tomorrow. The end result is something of a mixed bag, with the first half being a solid action thriller along the lines of Ringo Lam’s Full Contact, then lapsing into total insanity during its second half which is filled with so many inane subplots, ridiculous action sequences, and continuity errors that they would give Ed Wood pause. Pop singer Chang Yee Kin stars as a young gangster protege who, after he is framed for drug smuggling and murder, flees to the People’s Republic of China, where he must fight for his life against hired killers. He goes into hiding as a dishwasher in a Chinese restaurant, but when the bad guys rape and cripple his girlfriend, he comes out of hiding to exact a bloody revenge against the vicious rival who is setting him up to be killed. The script is brutal and nihilistic but goes overboard in the second act as the chain of events goes from tragic to ludicrous. The actors are all very charismatic, and the performances are uniformly excellent, but even they can’t make the ridiculous second half work — a shame considering the promise held by the great first 45 minutes. Still, it’s not a total waste of time and fans may want to see it just for the beginning and the exciting gunfighting set pieces and, who knows, with hilarious nicknames like “Lobster” and “Holland Boy,” coupled with the occasional appearance of the bizarre goofiness for which director Jing is known, maybe the whole enterprise was designed as a camp throwaway. Perhaps the director of Stephen Chow’s silly comedies isn’t exactly the perfect choice to direct a hard-boiled crime melodrama, but the film is frustratingly both more than you expect and less than you might have hoped for — a contradiction that fits this confused film like a glove.
This article appears in October 7 • 1994 (Cover).