It’s a good time to be a John Woo fan. After years of being unavailable (thanks to the rights being held hostage by the now-defunct Weinstein Company offshoot, Dragon Dynasty), the iconic Cinema City/Golden Princess film archive has been newly liberated, with Shout! Factory going back to the archives and re-releasing all of the action maestro’s classics. Pretty much all of them are available digitally (The Criterion Channel is showcasing them all this month), but Shout! has also been putting out 4K Blu-rays that are absolutely loaded with extra features. Probably the most elaborate set they’re issuing is the one for the A Better Tomorrow trilogy.
If you’re unaware of this series, the first A Better Tomorrow film was John Woo’s first heroic bloodshed movie, introducing Chow Yun-Fat in a star-making role as the pistol-packing gangster Mark Gor. A sequel was made (despite Gor being killed in the first film), as well as a prequel, which Woo did not direct. The entire trilogy is presented in this set, but what’s really cool is that the second film, A Better Tomorrow 2, includes a newly discovered workprint that runs a full half hour longer than the original.
The production of the second film was notoriously fraught, with Woo’s final cut of the movie hacked to ribbons. Many believed it was lost forever, but Shout! discovered it in the Hong Kong Film Archive, where it was mislabeled as an English dub. While in somewhat rough shape, the movie was completed by Woo and printed from a legit 35mm copy. While worn, it’s extremely watchable, and it’s fascinating to see what was cut out of the film.
It turns out the iconic final gunfight was heavily edited before release, running just over ten minutes in the original cut. In the workprint, it runs twenty minutes. There’s a whole host of new footage, including a sword battle between Ti Lung’s character and the infamous assassin with sunglasses, who later trades guns with Chow Yun-Fat’s Ken. In fact, that scene itself goes on a lot longer, with them also trading ammunition and flipping a coin. It’s also far more violent, and the movie has a totally different ending compared to the more ambiguous one in the released version.
While the workprint is interesting, arguably the original cut is superior, but it’s still incredible to have this lost version included in the Blu-ray set. What’s notable is that even Woo himself had no idea this version still existed—he doesn’t mention it in his interview included with the set. In fact, in the interview he mentions how much he regretted cutting a scene where Chow Yun-Fat’s Ken and his friendship with the black New York Cop who helps him out in the Chinese restaurant scene is fleshed out. It’s present in the workprint. The interview itself is great, with Woo freely admitting he had no interest in making a sequel. The reason he made it was that his boss and friend Dean Shek (who co-stars in the movie) went into a suicidal depression and moved to America. Woo and co-producer Tsui Hark were terrified he’d kill himself, so they flew to America to bring him home, and they used this as the basis for the film’s story, where Shek’s character has a breakdown. Woo also admits that new guns were coming out of the West that he wanted to showcase in the film, so he gave in, made the movie, and says he actually had a good time making it since he loved the cast and staging the action.
So, if you like A Better Tomorrow 2 as much as I do (despite its flaws), this set is a no-brainer. It comes out on November 18th, but you can pre-order it HERE!