General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20266 min read

A Better Tomorrow III (英雄本色III夕阳之歌)

A Better Tomorrow III (英雄本色III夕阳之歌) is a 1989 Hong Kong action crime film directed and produced by Tsui Hark (徐克), starring Chow Yun-fat, Anita Mui, and Tony Leung Ka-fai, and serving as a prequel to the A Better Tomorrow series¹. Set in Saigon during the final period of the Vietnam War, it traces the early years of Chow's character Mark, with Anita Mui's gang matriarch Chow Ying-kit (周英杰) leading the plot¹. The film premiered in Hong Kong on 20 October 1989, runs 119 minutes, and was shot in Cantonese².

Key fact	Detail
Director / producer	Tsui Hark, who had produced the first two A Better Tomorrow films directed by John Woo¹^•³
Cast	Chow Yun-fat (Mark), Anita Mui (Chow Ying-kit), Tony Leung Ka-fai (Cheung Chi-man), Shih Kien, Saburo Tokito (Ho Cheung-ching)¹
Release	Hong Kong premiere 20 October 1989; 119 minutes; Cantonese²
Box office	HK$18,476,116 in Hong Kong, ranked 8th for the year⁴
Theme song	"Sunset Song" (夕阳之歌), sung by Anita Mui, composed by Kohji Makaino, lyrics by Chan Siu-kei⁵
Awards	Two nominations at the 9th Hong Kong Film Awards (1990): Best Art Direction (Luk Chi-fung) and Best Film Score (Lowell Lo)²
Ratings	IMDb 5.9; Douban 7.5²

Spoilers

Story and setting

The film is set in southern Vietnam between the late Vietnam War years and the fall of Saigon⁶. Mark (Chow Yun-fat) and his cousin Cheung Chi-man (Tony Leung Ka-fai) travel to Saigon to raise money to bribe officials and bring Mark's uncle, who runs the family pharmacy there, back to Hong Kong; Chi-man decides to smuggle US dollars, and Mark accompanies him to meet the smuggler Chow Ying-kit (Anita Mui)². The Hong Kong Film Archive synopsis places the smuggling during the 1974 period of Sino-Vietnamese conflict, with the pair rescued by Chow Ying-kit, the woman of gang boss Ho Cheung-ching (Saburo Tokito), after an ambush¹.

Mark and Ying-kit fall in love, and Ho Cheung-ching, who has reappeared after years of disappearance, hunts them down; the story ends in a gun-battle reckoning between Mark and Ho¹^•⁶. Ying-kit chooses to stay beside Ho, intending to die with him, and Mark only later understands her motive⁶.

A prequel that rewrote Mark

Because the first film had made Mark a mythic figure and the sequel extended him through a twin brother, the third film took a different route: Tsui Hark rewrote Mark's earlier life, and the poster and plot alike are built around Anita Mui's gang boss Chow Ying-kit⁷. The film explains the origins of Mark's signature traits: his black trench coat and round sunglasses were gifts from Ying-kit, and his uncanny marksmanship, underworld wisdom, and devotion to the woman he loves all come from her⁷.

M+ curator notes describe the role as unique in Hong Kong gangster cinema and argue that only Anita Mui, with her chameleonic image and star presence, could have carried it; the film was programmed at M+ in 2023 to mark the twentieth anniversary of Mui's death⁷.

Historical allegory

Tsui Hark used the fall of Saigon to comment on the Hong Kong of 1989. In an essay written for M+, the South Korean director Park Chan-wook, known for his Vengeance Trilogy and a former film critic, explains that Tsui saw the 1974 reunification of Vietnam and the subsequent mass departure of ethnic Chinese as parallel to the middle-class emigration wave around Hong Kong's 1997 handover, which is why Tsui set the film in "here and now"³.

Park reads the film as a "future film": where Tsui's earlier historical dramas Shanghai Blues and Peking Opera Blues reconstructed the past for reflection or used it to allegorize the present, this film adds a third mode, using history to depict a future whose ending is already visible³. In the prequel, Mark is neither a hero nor even a gangster, just a penniless nobody whose father has disappeared in mainland China; the cousins are effectively displaced refugees, and Mark's fate, already written in the first film, mirrors Hong Kong's fate before the handover³.

The film's fatalism extends to its action. Park notes that the elegant slow-motion gunfights of the first two films are replaced by a plain, uniform stretching of frames: when the protagonist is thrown into desolate ruins, his helpless movements are slowed against music that is not rousing at all, conveying helplessness because the actions are meaningless. Mark tries to help his uncle escape and gets him killed; the uncle's killer is shot by soldiers before Mark can take revenge; and the woman he tries to save cannot be saved³.

Production and reception

Tsui Hark was born in Vietnam in 1950 and came to Hong Kong with his parents to escape the war, spending his youth in the United States; Park suggests the whole A Better Tomorrow series reads as Tsui's personal migration narrative³. The film was produced by Tsui's Film Workshop and Golden Princess, with screenplay by Tai Fu-ho and Leung Yiu-ming, cinematography by Peter Pau (黃永恒), music by Lowell Lo (卢冠廷), and editing by Tsui, David Wu, and Mak Chi-sin¹^•⁵.

The film earned HK$18,476,116 in Hong Kong, ranking 8th for the year⁴. M+ notes that the film was not well received by the market, and that its allegory of Saigon's fall was quickly forgotten in Hong Kong's late-transition-period atmosphere⁷. Park writes that Tsui may have been prepared for poor box office or criticism, but evidently did not expect critics and intellectuals to ignore the meaning behind the film he poured himself into, and suggests that later generations may regard it as the finest work in the series³.

The film received two nominations at the 9th Hong Kong Film Awards in 1990, for Best Art Direction (Luk Chi-fung) and Best Film Score (Lowell Lo), winning neither². Its theme song, "Sunset Song," sung by Anita Mui with music by Kohji Makaino and lyrics by Chan Siu-kei, became a classic in its own right¹^•⁵.

Tsui Hark's own assessment

In a career interview, Tsui Hark said that John Woo did not want to make a third film, believing the story was finished, and that Tsui agreed but could not resist saying more about the character by returning to his past. He later concluded he was wrong: "the result was not what I had expected." He attributed the split with Woo partly to Woo's wish to move into international production and partly to Woo's feeling that Tsui interfered with his creativity, an issue Tsui acknowledged in himself⁸. Woo went on to make his own Vietnam story, Bullet in the Head (1990)⁸.

A note on running time: the Hong Kong Film Archive lists the film at 108 minutes¹, while M+ and the Chinese-language film database list 119 minutes⁷^•².

References

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 15, 2026; Oct 21, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026