Watch Return to a Better Tomorrow For Free

Sadly Over-hyped

How sad is this?

In truth, there is barely enough story here to make a film.

This is a coming of age storyline that you've seen in one form or another for decades. It takes a truly unique voice to make yet another one worth watching.

A they say, this is not related to the John Woo Tsui Hark films from the 1980's. What this is is a messy crime drama that looks and moves like a poor cousin of many better crime films from Hong Kong. The story has gangsters bonding over various criminal acts in a typical blood and testosterone manner. Regrettably its not a bonding thats worth watching. The film looks like a good number of films from the decade before it was made with a high gloss/ high quotient of colored lighting for some effect. There are no characters only caricatures. The action is a confused mess, often reduced to ultra slow motion. To be honest I only made it through one disc of the VCD before I gave up. A waste of time and a dollar.

I didn't expect it to have anything to do with the first three movies. I didn't expect the action or the stars to be as powerful. All I wanted was a solid, fun action movie. I didn't even get that! Instead I get another throwaway stupid movie that makes you turn off the DVD player about 20 min. into it.The "cool" factor is gone. All you have are the typical blue lights symbolizing nighttime and a bunch of guys walking in slo-mo WITHOUT looking cool. Ugh, I usually write reviews longer than this but you get the idea. The typical blurry, fast-forward-punches, blue-lights as nighttime crap everyone ignores....except this has the "Better Tomorrow" name on it! John Woo should make another one in the series just so this cannot be the last one.

Let me get one thing straight before I start reviewing Return to a Better Tomorrow. It is in no way a sequel, or prequel to John Woo's class "A Better Tomorrow" starring Chow Yun Fat.Return To A Better Tomorrow is like many underrated Hong Kong action movies. It has great action sequences, good unknown actors and a healthy storyline. The great thing about Hong Kong movies is that no matter how small the budget, it always seems to pull off pretty well. Like Robert Rodriguez's "El Mariachi" for example, even if it's not a Hong Kong action movie, considering it's budget ($7000) it's a great movie.Anyway back to Return to a Better Tomorrow. Although it has nothing to do with A Better Tomorrow, this movie does seem to take a leaf out of John Woo's classic film. Some of the scenes in RTABT do have a slight "deja-vu" feel to them, I thing the director was heavily influenced by A Better Tomorrow and decided to base a lot of the action within RTABT from Woo's ABT.The storyline has all the classic elements of a gangster/Hong Kong action movie: faith, brotherhood, trust, treachery etc, just like A Better Tomorrow, this is when RTABT does start to feel like it's been heavily influenced by the classic John Woo movie, none the less...it's still a great film, if underrated.This should please most action junkies out there, but please...don't consider it a sequel to A Better Tomorrow.7/10.

Although it has nothing to do with the A BETTER TOMORROW series, this movie still packs a wallop. It is a very stylish actioner with a very good performance by Lau Ching-Wan. This movie is sometimes very brutal even though it has been severely cut by the Hong Kong censors probably to avoid a category III rating. Of course, there's plenty of references to the works of John Woo but the director manages to not rip off his style and scenes. Here, Wong Jing told his movie straight-forward with flesh and blood characters and, for once, he avoids his typical low-brow juvenile humour opting for a more realistic and pessimistic approach. Highly recommended.