Gong woo jip ban yan

Since the large economic success of John Woo's A BETTER TOMORROW there is no want of imitations, resulting in a genre unique to Hong Kong cinema - "Heroic Bloodshed", for which a "code of honour" possessed by Triad thugs becomes the spine of a profitable formulary as gangsters are shown to be just as loyal to their friends as they are pitiless to enemies, with this melodrama being a rather typical example of the species. In this instance, the honourable Triad member is Lee Sam (Miu Kiu Wai), freshly released following a three year prison stretch who, after exacting violent vengeance upon those responsible for his stay behind bars, has fled for his safety to Taipei, where he reluctantly goes to work for Billy, an erstwhile confederate but, after saving the latter's skin in several instances, Sam decides to retire from the Triad way of life and becomes a commercial fisherman. At this point, the storyline emphasis segues to young Crow (Mok Siu Chung, with the film's best performance), a betel nut street seller outside of Billy's Taiwan headquarters who longs to become a Triad boss, but after a stint as a low level runner, he is faced with an untenable plight because Billy lusts for Crow's girlfriend, and only Sam will be able to aid him. Hong Kong's Tai Sing Studio has spawned many works in similar vein, and this piece manages to include virtually every cliché common to the ilk, a posture that a solution to a moral dilemma can be found only through violence being merely one of its most prominent flaws, with the DVD version highlighting others, including erratic sound editing, grotesquely inaccurate English subtitles for the Mandarin dialogue along with a meaningful but untranslated portion of text employed for an early scene shift.

Hero Of Tomorrow is a heroic bloodshed movie that was one of many movies that came out in Hong Kong that tried to capitalize on the huge success of A Better Tomorrow. While this film is not too original and not nearly done as well as the masters of the genre John Woo and Ringo Lam, I thought that this was pretty good. Max Mok and Kiu Wai Miu are lower level gangsters trying to get out of the criminal life, a gambling debt keeps them involved in the underworld which leaves to their downward spiral and bloodsoaked climax. Ka Kui Ho is great as a ruthless triad boss and there are many familiar faces in HK cinema that fans of the genre will recognize. The film is very dark, gritty and grim and ultra violent melodrama that was nicely shot with some pretty wild action scenes. Hero Of Tomorrow is pretty standard for the genre though and is a ripoff of A Better Tomorrow for sure. While this film is not in any way exceptional or original, it is a pretty solid movie that most fans of heroic bloodshed movies should enjoy. If you can accept that nothing about this movie really goes above and beyond average, this is still a pretty solid triad action movie .

Max Mok performs well as a rising wanna-be triad thug, however the material falls short to deliver any punch to his dialogue. Other characters around him are flat, thus the audience's connection with the movie dwindles. A mediocre Heroic Bloodshed movie of the era, it fails to excite or maintain interest past the few fights. Max Mok and his partner on the street, Wing-Ching Cheung, try to slowly climb up the Triad ladder to make bigger bucks with higher stakes illegal operations. Cheung is a gambling addict however, and when massive debt befalls onto him, Mok as his partner takes equal responsibility for such debt. A Triad boss is much too aggressive to allow both Mok and Cheung alive, in which the movie follows Mok's consequential tragedy and vengeance to kill the Triad boss. If your running out of films to explore in the Heroic Bloodshed genre, it's an average revenge film to watch. Personally with the exception of the last 10 minutes I felt it to be mostly bland, but the conclusion to Max's plight has one hell of a "bang". Let's just say this might win the medal for the most amount of squibs used on one actor, a Swiss cheese death sequence will end the movie on a high note. Besides this one flash-bang moment though, the film is overall unmemorable. 3/10