A Better Tomorrow II

Chuffed by the success of A Better Tomorrow, Woo wanted to go straight on to The Killer and Bullet in the Head. But Tsui Hark insisted on a sequel, and came up with a storyline to press his point. The result is not 'the worst film ever made' (as Woo has been heard to describe it), but it's clear that his heart wasn't in it. The plot is a virtual rerun of the first one: ex-hoods and cops team up to beat ruthless counterfeiting racketeers by any means necessary. Since the Mark Lee character was killed off last time, it was necessary to invent Ken Lee, a twin brother in New York, to bring back Chow Yun-Fat - who (not surprisingly in the circumstances) treats the whole thing as a joke. There are odd flashes of Woo's talent, but the endless cross-cutting between characters generates no tension and the vast expenditure of (mostly ineffective) bullets and grenades looks more like Death Wish than a sign of visionary excess.