![]() Luckily Tsui Hark came along and offered to produce a long gestating project that Woo wanted to direct. Prior to the release of A Better Tomorrow, John Woo had a bit of a crisis with his career and felt burnt out. For the purpose of this, I will mainly focus on the original series, but may include some asides to other films of the time. It would be hard to count how many Heroic Bloodshed movies (a term created by Rick Baker, editor for Eastern Heroes magazine at the time) were released in the ensuing years after the release of the first movie in 1986. ![]() There have also been a great number of rip-offs and homage’s due to the success of the first movie. The Better Tomorrow series isn’t only the work of John Woo, as the series has had contributions from other directors, mainly the great Tsui Hark, who took over the series with part 3. Both of these movies share similar themes of brotherhood, loyalty and betrayal but are not shot in the same style that would have come to define Woo’s later work. The closest he had perhaps come to a movie with similar themes would have been Last Hurrah for Chivalry (1979), or the underrated Heroes Shed No Tears (1986). Although he had made action movies before such as the early martial arts movie Hand of Death (1976), which featured an early role for a young Jackie Chan, it wasn’t until A Better Tomorrow that his signature style and themes started to take shape. Before A Better Tomorrow (1986), John Woo had worked in a number of genres such as comedy, romance and martial arts films. With the recent news that John Woo was finally returning to the gangster genre with his remake of the Japanese movie Manhunt (1976), I thought that it would be good to look back at the series of films that turned Woo’s career around, the Better Tomorrow series.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |