A Better Tomorrow Movie Review

John Woo's ode to slow-motion blood splatters has earned raves from his adoring fans, but this tale of two brothers -- one good, one bad -- certainly has some much better contemporaries. Chow Yun-Fat and Leslie Cheung are mildly memorable in the aforementioned roles (one's a counterfeiter, the other is a cop on his trail), but Woo's penchant for slo-mo violence as a means of getting from one scene to the next wears thin after about 25 minutes. An atrocious dubbing job doesn't help (though subtitled versions do exist), and the dated 80s plot line makes things all the worse.

Die-hard fans of Chow and Woo will find plenty to like, but frankly, I'll take the overblown theatrics of Suture instead, when it comes to a warring brothers flick.

Aka Ying huang boon sik.