Ying xiong ben se 2018

From some of the boldest music choices to drastic switches in tone of cinematography to one of the best shootout scenes in forever, A Better Tomorrow 2018 felt like a firework so bursting with life that it left me too busy savoring every minute details of brilliance to think about its flaws. You can just feel how much love and thought director Ding Sheng and the cast put into every scene. Even all the jokes avoid lazy one-liners but instead are all carefully set-up earlier to land perfectly.

The film itself is loosely based on the 1986 film by John Woo. While the overall story is the same, the tone is completely different. This one is louder, more fun, yet somehow has more grounded characters that loses some of the dramatic feel but still tells the story.

The boldest and most perfectly cast character in the film is the nepotism casting of Qingdao, the director's hometown and a port city that's also the beer capital of China (it was colonized by the Germans). Far from the rough, gritty urban streets of Hong Kong, the sprawling seaside port of Qingdao brings to the film more vibrant and boisterous street tales and a sense of lostness on the sea. The city is used as a story-telling device so much that it's hard to imagine the story being told anywhere else. Every aspect of the city is used, from a cool boat chase scene earlier on, to the contrast between Zhou Kai's floating boat home and Zhou Chao's grounded home, to Zhou Kai's post and Ma Ke's post-heist jobs both involving the sea, to its apparently very cool underground water system that sets as a location for several key scenes. All of those combine to form the theme of the story is brotherhood as a harbor, a haven for you no matter how far you've sailed.

Wang Kai gives one of his strongest performance yet as Zhou Kai, a reformed smuggler trying to make mends with his cop brother (Ma Tianyu) and his buddy Ma Ke (Darren Wang). There are certainly notable details that he added to his character, but for the most part, it just felt so natural. After the rather mediocre The Devotion of Suspect X, I had almost forgotten how good Wang Kai could be at acting. Not for a moment did I feel like he was giving the performance of his life, because it never feels like a performance. No lengthy monologues, no powerful speeches, no psychotic personalities, just Zhou Kai being Zhou Kai, an ordinary person in extraordinary situations.

The film feels completely different from the 1986 version. The synopsis is the same, and that's about it. The film knows its limits. Instead of trying to replicate the classic Chow Yun-fat role, Darren Wang's Ma Ke is a completely different but still lovable character. Darren Wang plays his forte as a street punk with a heart of a gold, and completely sold it. He did all his punchlines in character, and mostly sold emotional scenes. There was also shootout scene that he got to do that's nothing short of iconic, and he did not disappoint. A few of his mini-monologues could've used better delivery, but this is easily his best performances yet (although to be fair, that bar is not that high).

Compared to his co-stars, Ma Tianyu's performance was not so smooth-sailing. It's unfortunate because his role actually has a lot of room for character development, but Ma Tianyu was able to do the perfunctory acting as an officer and a little brother and that's it. There were three key scenes that jumped out as stagey, and two of them were due to Ma Tianyu's facial expressions (or lack there of). In one scene, Zhou Kai conveyed more emotion with his eyes alone than Zhou Chao with his whole body and face. Luckily, Ma Tianyu looks the part and did fine enough in most of the other scenes (and pulled off his other two key emotional scenes) to not be too much of a distraction.

The last scene that felt off was mostly due to poor martial arts choreography. The film is produced by Jackie Chan's company, so of course it is choreographed by Jackie Chan's team. Unfortunately, the hand-to-hand combat scenes had way too many edits for me to tell how good the choreography is, and at least one shootout had people falling weirdly. Two highly-stylized shootout scenes were amazingly edited, though, combining the beats and performances Peking opera and geisha dance with gunshots and punches.

It's a delight to see any director to use music as a character, a punchline, and to define mood, and Ding Sheng does all of those. The bold music uses mostly paid off, especially in all the fight/chase/shootout scenes. On the other hand, the use of hymns in two scenes felt out-of-place for a modern Chinese film, and the main theme was overused. Wang Leehom's theme song (penned by the director) was perfect for the scene it was used for. Either way, I was just excited to see a Chinese director unafraid to use music.

A Better Tomorrow 2018 may be far from perfect, but it gave me so much too love that I don't care.

Just like how the original movie turned out to highlight the best of Chow Yun Fat's acting as Mark, the same goes for this 2018 version in which Darren Wang's acting as Ma Ke was a show stealer. I watched the original movie super long time ago so hard to be making much comparisons although I did notice certain differences on how the story plot being played out despite maintaining the definitive themes on friendship, brotherhood and crime gang. The action scenes were so-so in my opinion (the legendary shooting scenes by John Woo were classic memorables) but it did try to showcase its own flair when Ma Ke went solo to the Japanese triad. As such I feel this movie relies more on the casts' actings, from the main characters to the special guesting including the short scenes with Eric Tsang while in the prison. True enough, for me the chemistry between Wang Kai and Darren Wang was superb as they interacted throughout the movie. Although there were still that few moments I could not help but to feel if only they added in more of the "oomph" on brotherlihood with proper build up instead of just glazing over some difficulties faced by Zhou Kai in his failed attempts to rebuild his life the proper way as stepping stone to reconnect with Ma Ke again. I did not feel an equivalent level of chemistry between Wang Kai and Ma Tian Yu despite recalling this movie's key point is on these two brothers and how the blames, shames and guilts threatened their kinship. Nonetheless it was enjoyable still and definitely worth watching. I'd rewatch for the good 'ol feeling. And intermittently throughout the movie, you get to be reminded of/reminisced on the original OST sung by the late Leslie Cheung.

So, I'm going to start by saying that this movie is an homage to the 1986's movie A Better Tomorrow. The story goes around two brothers and a friend, in opposite sides of the law, and the ups and downs in their lives.

1986 is one of my all-time favourites, in 2010 there was a korean remake of this movie, very competent as well. This one hasn't got the finesse of Woo's shootouts - that why he is one of the most famous action director in asian/american cinema - and hasn't the "deepness" of the story in the korean version - usually the koreans try to build a solid story, and by doing so, they build characters, as well - but this is really a very good movie. The story is straight forward, the pacing is very nice, there's a lot of action scenes, here, more direct and simple...

So, eventhough there's no way this can match to the original, is, still, one hell of a joy ride.

'A BETTER TOMORROW 2018': Four Stars (Out of Five)

A loose remake of John Woo's classic 1986 action crime-drama. It deals with the tale of a former drug smuggler, fresh out of prison, that tries to start a new crime-free life, and patch things up with his estranged brother, who's also a rising police star in the narcotics division. The film stars Wang Kai, Ma Tianyu, Darren Wang and Li Mincheng. It was written and directed by Ding Sheng. I found parts of it to be really slow-paced, and overly melodramatic, but the action scenes are really well done.

The story deals with two brothers, one's a rising narcotics police officer and the others a drug smuggler. When the drug smuggler is busted by his brother, and their ill father passes away, the police officer vows never to forgive his drug dealing brother. When the criminal gets out of prison though, he vows to start a new crime-free life, and to try to patch things up with his brother. Other dangerous criminals cause more problems for the siblings though. I saw the original movie a couple of decades ago, so I don't remember that much about it, but I do remember it being really melodramatic and cheesy. So it's no surprise to me that this remake is the same way. Like the original though, the action scenes are spectacular. They're definitely not as impressive as a John Woo movie, back in the day, but I'd say they're worth seeing the movie for (at least once).

What made me feel uncomfortable again about this Chinese movie was the ridiculous script about putting the Chinese police force to carry out missions on foreign soil. We know that the Chinese communist government has something similar to American's FBI and DEA, issuing some kinda "Red Warrant" to catch some Chinese criminals abroad and bring them back to China. But such warrant has not sanctioned or legalized by almost every foreign governments, so it'd carry out under the radar of the foreign authorities.

But what we saw at the very beginning in this film was not what it should be or shouldn't be. A bunch of Chinese plain-cloth detectives, most of them were too young to be convinced easily qualified as detectives, they openly used firepower trying to catch some dubious Chinese criminals in an European city, looked more like in Italy since all the roofs were red-clay tiles.

Then when the camera lens shifted, we saw the Chinese smugglers trying to do business in Japan. We saw a very bad Taiwanese actor acting like an annoying clown, a sidekick to a cool Chinese veteran smuggler.

At that moment, the usual formulaic Chinese movie production had become so obvious, readily kicked in again: The Chinese screenplays, no matter what, doing good or doing bad, got to be in foreign countries, on foreign soil. Well, I'm just so tired of this kinda unrealistic phony Chinese movies.