A Better Tomorrow III
A prequel, set in Saigon during the fall, and the weakest link in the trilogy, unacceptably restrained in both action and emotion. Chow Yun-fat plays a younger version of Mark, his original character, a hesitant young man digging for his roots in Vietnam, which was also Tsui's birthplace, and we get to watch him assemble his totemic trappings: the duster overcoat, the French shades, the twin .45s. The surprise is that he gets most of them from a torchy dame played by Anita Mui (the seductive singing ghost fromRouge), who's a more-than-worthy high-noir love object. She can perforate miscreants with the best of them. (John Woo wrote the original script, only to be supplanted as director by his boss and supposed pal, Mr. Tsui; much of Woo's original material ended up in his later magnum opusBullet in the Head.)--David Chute