A Better Tomorrow

Song Hae Sung

The story: Hyuk (Joo Jin Mo) makes good in the South Korean port city of Busan as a mobster after escaping from the North. But he is haunted by the fact that his younger brother Chul (Kim Kang Woo) was left behind. Hyuk eventually tracks him down but their reunion is bittersweet as Chul blames him for the death of their mother.

After a deal goes sour in Thailand, Hyuk is sentenced to three years in prison. When he gets out, he finds that his best friend and fellow gang member Young Chun (Song Seung Heon) has fallen on hard times and Chul is now a police officer.

Real men shed tears and are not afraid of showing their emotions.

At its core, A Better Tomorrow (1986) was a bromantic triangle involving triad member Ho (Ti Lung), his best buddy Mark (Chow Yun Fat) and Ho’s younger brother Kit (Leslie Cheung).

Ho was torn between his brother in arms and his brother in blood; that meant plenty of scope for drama, complete with wailing and anguished emoting.

In this Korean remake, executive produced by the original’s director John Woo, the triangle remains intact. So fully does director Song Hae Sung embrace the bromance, in fact, that he even eschews the token female presence of the Hong Kong version.

But the plot varies between the original and the update. This is unlike Martin Scorsese’s The Departed (2006) which hewed so closely to Andrew Lau and Alan Mak’s cop thriller Infernal Affairs (2002) that scenes were recreated shot for shot.

The North-South Korea context grounds the remake in a distinctively charged political context and adds another layer of friction to the relationship between the brothers Hyuk and Chul.

Joo Jin Mo, the suave leading man of films such as the comedy 200 Pounds Beauty (2006), adds stoic nobility to the role of the guilt-stricken and torn Hyuk – and cries beautifully – though Ti Lung gave a more restrained performance in the same role and won the Golden Horse Best Actor award for it.

Kim Kang Woo is more believable as the hurt and angry Chul, improving on the late Leslie Cheung’s eager-beaver cop, which came across exaggerated.

Heart-throb Song Seung Heon is best known for playing the sensitive artist in the weepie TV drama Autumn In My Heart (2000) and he has perhaps the biggest shoes to fill as Young Chun. While he swaggers coolly in shades and a trenchcoat, also the fashion statement of choice in A Better Tomorrow (1986), he does not have quite the same playful insouciance that a toothpick-chewing Chow Yun Fat brought to the role of Mark and won the Best Actor at the Hong Kong Film Awards for it.

Some decent performances notwithstanding, the Korean version is let down by slack pacing – it clocks in at two hours compared to the original’s sleeker 95 minutes – and a gaping plot hole in the final showdown.

Woo’s stylistic trademarks – the trenchcoat flapping in slow motion, the all-out gun battles, the macabre dance of death of flailing limbs amid bullet shower – are all here.

In the end, though, this Tomorrow is not better.

(ST)