A Better Tomorrow III (Taiwan version) DVD Region All

For A Better Tomorrow III (also known as Love and Death in Saigon), Tsui returned to his home (he lived in Saigon until he was fourteen) for the first time in decades and quickly discovered just how hard it was to make a movie in Vietnam. Equipment didn't work, tanks didn't move, helicopters didn't fly, and the government-supplied pyrotechnics expert killed himself in an explosion while having a cigarette. Today Tsui Hark says the movie was a mess. "Too long," he complains. He shouldn't.

A Better Tomorrow III is the kind of movie that gives pop a good name. Not for Tsui Hark the religious guilt and redemption of John Woo. Instead, his prequel to the A Better Tomorrow films works on the level of grand opera with characters and emotions on a scale only the Metropolitan Opera House could comfortably contain.

Traveling to Vietnam to extract his cousin, Cheung Chi-mun (Tony Leung Kar-fai), and his uncle, Chow Yun-fat plays a young Mark Gor who's never touched a gun. It's 1974 and the world is in chaos: Saigon is about to fall and the Cultural Revolution is raging in Mainland China. The only stability in this fallen world are money and blood debts. Fortunately for Cheung and Mark Gor, Anita Mui, playing a shadowy black marketeer in Vietnam named Chow Ying-kit, takes the two of them under her wing. Mui is the female Mark Gor: white trench coat flapping in the wind, shades clamped to her eyes, an M-16 in either hand, her enemies falling in slow motion before her like snowflakes.

Chow and Anita meet cute in the middle of a gun battle and fall in love; the only problem is that Anita is still devoted to her old lover, Ho, who's been missing for three years. On cue, Ho shows up, Saigon falls, and our heroes barely escape with their lives. "Welcome to our vengeful world," Ho says to Chow Yun-fat as the two square off.

You could swim in the pathos of this movie, it's so deep, but Anita Mui is the real attraction, turning in one of the best dramatic performances of her career. "I worship you more than any woman on earth," someone says to her, and by the end of this movie you will, too.

by Grady Hendrix