What if I told you that the movie that created the cinematic grammar of violence used by action films like John Wick had the narrative structure of a romance novel?
That film is John Woo’s A Better Tomorrow.
It follows Sung Tse-Ho, a triad counterfeiter caught in a world of shifting loyalties. His younger brother Kit is a police officer who knows nothing of Ho’s criminal life. When a deal collapses into betrayal, Ho surrenders to authorities—a sacrifice meant to protect his family. But the syndicate, worried that he might talk, tries to take his father as a hostage, and kills him in the attempt.
Enter Mark Lee, Ho’s sworn brother. When he reads of Ho’s capture in a newspaper, something compels him forward. Not duty. Brotherhood. In a restaurant shootout that would echo through cinema for decades, Mark decimates the gang. But he doesn’t escape clean. A bullet takes his leg.
Three years later, Ho emerges from prison seeking only the anonymous life of a taxi driver. His world, though, has collapsed. Kit now sees him as the cause of their father’s death, a scarlet stain on his police career. Mark, reduced to limping through the streets picking garbage, has been enslaved by Shing—the very man who betrayed them both, now running the syndicate like a corporate empire.
The film builds toward something inevitable: betrayal demanding answer, love demanding sacrifice, and the question of whether survival means anything if you’re surviving alone.
On its surface, A Better Tomorrow is a story about gangsters. But the narrative engine of A Better Tomorrow is not driven by the plot to defeat the villain, Shing, but rather by the emotional reconciliation of the brothers.
In a traditional romance novel, the question is never ”Will there be a Happy Ever After?” That’s simply guaranteed; the tension comes from how the characters grow enough to deserve it. This same tension animates A Better Tomorrow.
At the beginning of the film we are shown the deep, affectionate love between brothers, familial and sworn.
In a romance, a misunderstanding or betrayal separates the lovers. Here, Ho’s criminal life leads to a father’s death. This creates the central emotional conflict: Kit’s hatred of Ho. The “question” of the film is not “Will Shing be defeated?” but “How will Kit come to forgive Ho?”
Romance protagonists must often endure humiliation or perform acts of service to prove their change of heart. Ho spends three years in prison and then works as a taxi driver, refusing to fight back when beaten, specifically to prove to Kit that he has changed. He is “wooing” his brother back through penance.
A romance often ends with a grand gesture, like a dash to the airport. In A Better Tomorrow, the grand gesture is the final shootout. Ho realizes that his actions and apologies are insufficient. He re-enters the criminal world not for profit, but to protect Kit.
The film grossed HK$34.7 million. It shattered the previous record. Overnight, it made Chow Yun-Fat an international star—and rewired Hong Kong’s entire industry. Gangster films flooded in. One movie changed what an audience wanted to see.
But its enduring impact was in how Woo showed us violence.
Guns are blunt instruments of death. For decades, Hollywood kept them symbolic. A character gets shot, clutches their chest, lets out a gasp, falls over. Clean. Sanitary. Morally digestible.
Bonnie and Clyde broke that. Its final sequence showed protagonists being torn apart by bullets from multiple angles, using slow-motion and squibs to force audiences to witness the violence, not abstract it away. A decade later, Sam Peckinpah made this uglier still. His gunplay emphasized trauma, devastation, the actual cost of modern weapons.
But Woo did something different entirely. He looked at Peckinpah’s brutality and Leone’s standoffs, sped them up, and asked: what if violence could be graceful?
Woo’s gun-fu redefined the visual language of action cinema through a radical reimagining:
Highly coordinated choreography that treats firearms like extensions of the body—not tools, but instruments of expression. Slow-motion not as brutality but as reverence, making each death monumental, each bullet its own tragedy. Infinite ammunition that keeps the percussive rhythm alive, letting the violence breathe as aesthetic spectacle. Impossible angles and unrealistic logistics that prioritize visual beauty over tactical sense. Melodrama elevated through careful cinematography and stylized bloodshed—violence as operatic experience.
This wasn’t just technique. It was a complete decoupling of gunplay from reality. Walk through modern action cinema and you see Woo’s fingerprints everywhere.
Tarantino absorbed this language. The Wachowskis built The Matrix with it.
And when Stahelski made John Wick, he didn’t invent the “gun-fu”, he inherited it from Woo, refined it through obsessive stunt choreography, and let it speak to a new generation.
Woo also refined his ideas. But A Better Tomorrow is the moment of creation. It is the movie where Woo invented vocabulary that filmmakers are still learning to speak.
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