Men with guns: "A Better Tomorrow"

The Arrow label continue their admirable project to dust down and recirculate the first, landmark movies of the Hong Kong action specialist John Woo, for so long locked up in rights limbo. We've already had the heaviest hitters: 1989's The Killer, 1990's Bullet in the Head, 1992's Hard Boiled. Now we get Woo's local breakthrough: a none-more-1986 honour-among-thieves variation, all cigarette smoke, sharp suits and sunglasses, which on first release beguiled young audiences in Woo's homeland and spawned a franchise. What may have seemed especially fresh forty years ago was the lighter tone A Better Tomorrow initially strikes: jaunty strings accompany early scenes illustrating the downtime of chuckling dudes with criminal connections. (Tarantino had to have been taking notes.) The main event, though, is the intersection of - perhaps better: collision between - a handful of these men: a charismatic currency forger and occasional hired gun (Chow Yun Fat, already a movie star), an aspirant young cop (Leslie Cheung), and the latter's brother (Ti Lung), a sometime mobster - and confrere of Chow's - attempting to go straight upon his release from prison. These new faces were handed new ideas to play with: this is one of those genre pics that increasingly seems like a riff on the concept of brotherhood, an experiment to see which family matters most to these guys, and whether the blood we see being spilled at regular intervals in ambushes and shootouts is really any thicker than water.

As exemplified by a few scenes introducing the cop's klutzy cellist girlfriend (Emily Chu), that opening stretch now seems tonally awkward; there's a lot of forced jollification up until the moment the plot proper kicks off with a betrayal and a home invasion. (Rumours have long persisted that certain scenes here were filmed by producer Tsui Hark.) And I suspect even those viewers whose entry points into the Woo canon were The Killer, Hard Boiled or Face/Off might be taken aback by how melodramatic the bulk of the film is. Playing out in hospital wards and domestic kitchens, this is on some essential level a male-oriented soap opera, one that sporadically erupts into spectacular carnage. (Like the later Infernal Affairs thrillers, with their side-swapping antagonists, this set-up invites serialisation.) One could claim this volatile sincerity as proof of this filmmaker's commitment to character; unlike Tarantino, Woo genuinely cares - and wants us to care - about who lives and who dies. Crucially, and despite Woo's love for filming bullet casings pinging around in super-slow motion, the action proceeds at a still-thrilling clip, compressing the events and complications of a three-hour epic of the Leone/Peckinpah stripe into a mere 96 minutes. Some of the plot's finer detail is itself compressed in this process: any future DVD release would benefit from a map illustrating how the main and supporting players relate, although even here, Woo seems to be fostering a useful ambiguity as to who the true hero(es) of the piece will ultimately be. His eye for the stirring gesture is already in place: witness Chow keeping a toothpick in one corner of his mouth and a snout in the other, or later improvising with a mechanic's trolley amid a shootout in a multistorey carpark. The awkwardness would be ironed out over the next decade, replaced by the assurance of a master - Woo's getting there by the time of the dockside finale here - but A Better Tomorrow retains the air of a dynamic apprentice work.

A Better Tomorrow opens in selected cinemas from tomorrow.