Gun Fu and John Woo's A Better Tomorrow Explained

Introduction: Woo Redefines the Action Film

John Woo redefined the action film genre with his 1986 Hong Kong film A Better Tomorrow. Starring Asian TV star Chow Yun Fat and film star Ti Lung, the film transcended the action genre already well established in the West. It did so by drawing on familiar tropes — gangsters, the conflicted family, brother against brother, a friend in peril, the reformed hood, betrayal — while mixing in elements of melodrama and morality (both Buddhism and Christianity appear in the film) and layering everything with stylized gun violence. Gunplay became, in Woo's hands, something like swordplay — a mode of expression that had never before been seen on screen. In certain moments the film played like a dance, with bullets used like rain to wash away problems and conflicts that could not otherwise be resolved.

For both Chinese and Western audiences, the film was something genuinely new. It appealed to Asian and Western cultural influences alike, tapping into a universal sense of art and meaning while never truly defying the underlying absurdities of the action film genre itself. In other words, it gave action film audiences exactly what they wanted while simultaneously delivering the genre in a stylistically elevated, slowed-down, and somewhat thoughtful way. This paper argues that in A Better Tomorrow, Woo both reinforces and undermines the conventions of the action genre by bringing to it a balladic style of violence — gun fu — while maintaining the stereotypical superficialities of the genre. It will also show how this style went on to influence Hong Kong and Western cinema.

Counterfeiting USD is one of the main crimes depicted in A Better Tomorrow — a film that melodramatically portrays brothers and friends torn by love, honor, and hatred, past sins, and the struggle for forgiveness. At its core the film is a simple tale about friendship and forgiveness, but in order to dazzle its audience, Woo also counterfeits Western action cinema. Everything is thrown into the film's egregious finale: an endless stream of bad guys for the heroes to shoot and blow up; a nonsensically contrived showdown in which all the characters are brought together in one place — a dock — where reconciliations can take place over a spray of bullets. True to the gun fu form that Woo essentially founded in this film (Shields), nothing brings people together like violence — and in A Better Tomorrow, the violent shootout improbably fulfills Mark's desire for revenge, Ho's desire for peace, and Kit's desire for justice.

These three characters, who seemed isolated and separated by powerful emotions just ten minutes earlier in the film, undergo a kind of collective amnesia — everything is set aside as they get back to basics, forget what separated them, and re-bond over bullets. At least that is the best way to characterize Mark's feelings. Upon slaying a whole line of bad guys, he pauses to force a lecture on Kit, fully sentimentalizing the moment in a manner true to the film's melodramatic core. He is gunned down in the middle of his impassioned speech, which gives Kit and Ho a chance to bond one-on-one over more bullets, picking up the revenge motif that Mark fumbles in his final minutes. The way Woo weaves revenge, love, forgiveness, and violence together in A Better Tomorrow — like a forged note — is what enables the film to appeal so strongly to both Asian and Western audiences: it passes itself off as both a conventional action flick and an art-house film, with scenes inspired by auteurs such as Martin Scorsese (Murray). The end result is a stylized work of gun fu that, under scrutiny, falls short of high art but still manages to be a respectable example of genre blending.

Gun Fu, Genre Blending, and Hong Kong Cinema's New Direction

The way A Better Tomorrow blends kung fu choreography with gunplay is what makes the film stand out, and its impact on Hong Kong cinema has been undeniable. As Jillian Sandell puts it, "if you've ever wished for a violent action film with the style and elegance of an MGM musical, Hong Kong cinema is the place to look." Were it not for Woo's film, the contemporary Hong Kong gangster film genre would never truly have coalesced — and as a result, auteurs like Tarantino would have had far less to build on in their own careers (Sandell). A Better Tomorrow spawned two sequels and a number of knock-offs. Woo kept upping the ante with each gun fu film that followed: The Killer, Hard Boiled, and City on Fire are all replete with stylized action and sentimentality — all dripping with blood and morality.

That was Woo's contribution to Hong Kong cinema: taking the action genre's mindless shoot-'em-ups and blending them with the kung fu genre's insistence on the discipline and morality of its protagonist, while adding melodramatic and moralistic tones inspired by Chinese culture's deep religious and philosophical traditions. It made for a fine and elegant mixture that only the most visionary directors could pull off. Keeping so many threads together at once is not easily achieved — over-indulgence in any single thread yields less than stellar results, as Woo's ill-advised Paycheck demonstrated. The glue holding them together, of course, was bullets — lots and lots of bullets: the one ingredient any modern action film needed. With Woo's trademark gun fu delivery, the bullets kept flying, and as A Better Tomorrow showed, there was no better moment than the shootout for characters to come to grips with themselves and finally understand one another.

Additionally, the film's climax illustrates one of the ways that Woo's cinema — and much of Hong Kong cinema broadly — mimics the West in offering easy solutions to complex dramatic problems. Stephen Chow's Kung Fu Hustle, for example, is an homage to Hollywood, with references to Kubrick's The Shining, to 20th-century noir films, and to The Three Stooges. Jackie Chan's films drew inspiration from Buster Keaton, and Woo likewise drew from Western cinema — from filmmakers like Hitchcock and Scorsese (Pierce). All of these filmmakers also had an impact on the West in return — Woo especially, whose Better Tomorrow and its introduction of gun fu inspired Western filmmakers from Robert Rodriguez to Oliver Stone to Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowskis ("John Woo's Influence on American Films").

As Abid Rahman points out, Woo sought to distance himself from the tepid and tiresome kung fu films flooding the market in the 1980s. By stylizing violence through gunplay, he brought a new layer of menace and tension to the screen that years of second-rate kung fu cinema had diminished. Not only is the violence in A Better Tomorrow charged with a loving touch — Mark stashing guns in flower pots the way Zorro might stash swords — it is also displayed in gleeful excess reminiscent of 1980s American films such as First Blood, Rambo: First Blood Part II, Commando, and The Terminator. By introducing gun fu to Asian cinema, Woo reinvigorated the action film genre while simultaneously reinforcing the superficiality of clichéd narratives, in which a good-versus-evil paradigm is showily trotted out in a moralistic manner, only to be reduced to a confusing blend of vengeance, self-sacrifice, and respect that never quite makes an effective moral point — nor truly captures the ambiguity of the best noir films of earlier eras that Woo nevertheless energetically copies.

Western Influence and the Global Spread of Gun Fu

Films inspired by Woo's gun fu style — first seen in Better Tomorrow — span both continents. Robert Rodriguez's Desperado (1995) features a loner guitar player seeking revenge in Mexico; the hero, played by Antonio Banderas, uses gun fu — a gun in each hand, arms fully extended, pitted alone against a slew of enemies — to accomplish his heroics. Keenan Ivory Wayans imitates Mark Gor directly in A Low Down Dirty Shame when he dons a black trench coat and sunglasses, a look that the Wachowskis would later pilfer for The Matrix. In cinema, everyone borrows from everyone when a trend catches on — and that is precisely what happened with Better Tomorrow. Hong Kong audiences made it a box office smash, and Western filmmakers took quick note of the gun fu style that was revamping the action genre.

In this way, the creative exchange between East and West became that much more meaningful: both industries were watching one another and drawing inspiration from what the other was doing. Oliver Stone's Natural Born Killers modeled its shootout scenes on Woo's gun fu style. Tarantino brought gun fu to American audiences in Reservoir Dogs. Even James Bond adopted the style in Tomorrow Never Dies — a title that could itself be read as a direct reference to Woo's very first gun fu film with Chow Yun Fat ("John Woo's Influence on American Films").

To describe A Better Tomorrow as Hong Kong neo-noir is fitting: it makes effective use of light and shadow to focus the audience's attention, create dramatic tension, and establish the kind of haunting imagery that European Baroque painters achieved through chiaroscuro — Honthorst, Rembrandt, and Caravaggio all created intensity of mood and expression by throwing concentrated light on one section of the canvas while shrouding the rest in darkness. Woo does the same on film, just as the noir filmmakers of the past did — from Ford to Huston to Welles. But Woo also draws from non-noir Western filmmakers such as Scorsese. He pays homage to Scorsese's Mean Streets (1973) in the scene where Mark walks in slow motion to take revenge on the thugs linked to Ho's arrest (Murray). The prelude to violence is hypnotic, stylish, and seductive. The suggestion of pleasure is double-edged: the audience thrills at the hint of the violent spectacle to come, while the director intimates that such activity is too weighty to be treated lightly. Indeed, Mark pays a price for his vengeful bravado — he is crippled by a bullet.

Conclusion: The Legacy and Limits of Gun Fu

In conclusion, Woo's gun fu cinema got its start with A Better Tomorrow — a Hong Kong film that revitalized a genre and spawned something new: the blend of kung fu and action/gangster film sensibilities. The result was a stylish display of violence and grace. The blend inspired filmmakers in both China and America to adopt Woo's style and bring the same type of bullet-flying bravado to their own work. At the end of the 20th century, filmmakers and audiences wanted something on screen that could personify their desire to act, to address the ills that affected them. Bullets and ballet seemed, for a time, to be the answer.

Better Tomorrow's ending may be sloppy and contrived, but gun fu enables brothers and friends to prove themselves and villains to pay a price. For both Eastern and Western audiences, gun fu was exactly what late-20th-century moviegoers wanted: a ballet-like form superimposed onto an old and ugly problem. Violence is turned into a hypnotic charm that makes one think — if only in the real world I could solve all my problems thus. Hong Kong's magical and fantastical position, wedged between East and West, allows for such thinking, and Woo found the cinematic form to communicate that idea effectively. Movie audiences and filmmakers in both Asia and America ran with it — until eventually the conceit ran out of gas. Today, gun fu has almost become a parody of itself, a hackneyed trope, as audiences exposed to one too many shootouts have tired of the form and found it to be just another clichéd way to treat subjects that deserve more than bullets can afford. For Woo in Better Tomorrow, they worked sufficiently well — but only on a superficial level. The style of gun fu never fully eradicates the need for the film's deeper underlying issues to be meaningfully addressed.

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