The Killer (2024, Dir. John Woo):
Thirty-five years ago, John Woo’s The Killer announced the arrival of modern Hong Kong action cinema and its double-barreled joys. Upon its release in art-house theaters in the West, critics didn’t know whether to gasp, cry or laugh. Some, like the Washington Post‘s Hal Hinson, did all of the above: “[It’s] like eating popcorn, but it’s not just any old brand; it’s escape-velocity popcorn, popcorn with a slurp of rocket fuel … [Woo’s] ideas overreach themselves with such a virile swagger that they border on comedy.” “Magnificent Obsession remade by Sam Peckinpah,” enthused The Village Voice‘s J. Hoberman.
Looking at the film through the lens of 2024 is like peering at a once-alien landscape that has since been overrun by McDonald’s and Subways. Woo himself is partially to blame: how many times can you film doves flapping their way across the screen in the midst of gunfire before audiences snicker at the self-parody of it all? It took Hollywood a while to cotton on to Woo (“He can certainly direct an action scene,” an exec said of his work; “Yeah, and Michelangelo can paint a ceiling!” retorted Quentin Tarantino), but soon all the major studios were co-opting Woo’s way of the gun, producing their own overwrought action extravaganzas, with every two-bit actor wielding automatics in Mexican standoffs or flying through the air while perforating bad guys with the greatest of ease. Eventually the action genre moved on to video-game ultraviolence (the Raid and John Wick films) and stunt-heavy spectacle (the Mission: Impossible franchise), while Woo’s brand of mayhem came to be regarded as quaint, outmoded, stilted. Why did his characters’ guns never require reloading? What was with all the spinning bodies and grand freeze-frames and slow-mo slaughter when John Wick would just get on with it and kill a dozen times as many people in the same amount of time?
Still, even now, one can see why The Killer made such an impression. A mix-and-match genre master, Woo wore his influences on his sleeve; the fact that most of those influences were Western only made his work stand out even more amongst a sea of rowdy Hong Kong comedies and wuxia brouhahas. Woo’s action scenes had Peckinpah’s brutal lyricism, only more baroque and less earthbound. His protagonists’ outsized passions and codes of loyalty had antecedents in the swordsman pics he directed in his youth, but his heroes’ cool affect under fire and sartorial elegance nodded to French New Wave touchstones like the late Alain Delon in Le Samourai, their dances with death as meticulously chorographed as a Gene Kelly musical. Ludicrous and thrilling, with each gun battle more over-the-top than the last, The Killer was flamboyant even by Woo’s own standards. Where other Woo epics like Hard-Boiled (1992) and Bullet in the Head (1990) leave a more metallic aftertaste, The Killer stands out in his oeuvre as the purest, most earnest expression of the conflicted chaos at the heart of his aesthetic: beautiful heroes, relentless slaughter, emotions uninhibited and ammo unlimited, poetry and pulp married in a bloodbath.
Setting aside his workmanlike retelling of The Romance of the Three Kingdoms (2008’s China-produced Red Cliff ), Woo hasn’t directed anything approaching a classic in ages, but during that time Hollywood never quite forgot about The Killer. Everyone from Richard Gere to Denzel Washington to Lupita Nyong’o has been linked to the property, but lest you have any lofty visions associated with those names, best to set them aside. Woo’s 2024 remake, fresh off his comeback movie Silent Night (2023), is a more modest affair, with the decidedly un-starry Nathalie Emmanuel in the role that made Chow Yun-Fat an international superstar. The bones of the plot remain the same: Emmanuel’s assassin-for-hire accidentally blinds a nightclub singer (Diana Silvers) during a job, and her new-found conscience over the consequences of the act sets off betrayals and bloodshed, even she attracts the attention of a dogged cop (Omar Sy). Tantalizingly, the action is relocated to Paris, home to Alain Delon’s Samourai and Vincente Minnelli’s American in Paris, hinting that these long-time influences might reenergize Woo’s filmmaking.
It turns out the movie that the 2024 Killer resembles most is Woo’s Once a Thief (1991), a trifle of a caper flick also filmed in Paris. It’s clear that Woo relishes the milieu: he finds time for sumptuous panoramas of the Seine while the flippant soundtrack suggests that fun is to be had (or at least expected), but like Once a Thief, The Killer is too blasé to concern itself with emotional or thematic weight. Shot in the desultory palettes that characterize straight-to-streaming productions (the film is produced by Peacock), the movie putters from set-piece to set-piece, the characters indulging in exposition rather than action. Where Chow Yun-Fat’s assassin was a romantic cipher, a hitman with a heart and a harmonica, Emmanuel’s Zee is more grounded yet disaffected, her dreary past explained in numerous flashbacks. “Does he deserve this death?” she questions her bluff, bullying handler Finn (Sam Worthington) every time she receives a new assignment; Worthington’s feral grin is a better answer to her question than anything he says. Save for these fleeting moments of ambivalence, this Killer is less obsessed about moral compunctions than it is about how fetching Emmanuel looks in a catsuit (and yes, she looks damn good).
Taking place mostly in daytime, the film is a reverse negative of the 1989 Killer‘s nocturnal tones, opting for bemusement over tragedy, sarcasm over sincerity. Every so often, familiar Woo touches creep in: a gliding Steadicam shot, the refrain of a schmaltzy love song hanging over the action, moments of slow-mo brio, black-clad killers on motorcycles, those damn doves (although this time they’re noted rather than lingered upon). Otherwise, the director goes for a more playful approach, with split-screens and cartoonish whip-pans emphasizing the movie’s sprightly feel. As in most Woo pictures, the heavies are nasty, but not memorably so. Worthington has fun hamming it up, and Saïd Taghmaoui and Eric Cantona guest as an Arabian kingpin and French crime lord, but none of them are consequential. Making a better impression in limited screen time is Woo’s own daughter Angeles as a silent assassin—Woo always prefers his baddies mute and deadly.
The bad guys weren’t the point of the original Killer, either: the film’s charge came from the friction between Chow’s criminal and Danny Lee’s roughhouse lawman, opposite sides of the same coin, drawn to each other’s honor even when pointing guns in each other’s faces, their mutual distrust and attraction fusing the heroic with the homoerotic. With the casting of Emmanuel and Sy, Woo has an opportunity to update the rubric and tease out some heterosexual chemistry, but although both actors are very sexy people, the 2024 Killer is a sexless proposition. A pivotal scene in which a cuffed-up Emmanuel is interrogated by Sy opts for chumminess over tension, and Sy (who himself plays a sly, soulful hero in his Lupin TV series) has little to do beyond argue with weak-minded superiors and dash to and from crime scenes. The original Killer featured heartfelt expressions of loyalty and fatalism; the remake jokes about how it’s a sin to kill a policeman.
Without a thematic backbone or Woo’s trademark gonzo intensity to fall back on, this edition of The Killer is content to hit its marks in amiable fashion. It’s a bit clumsy out of the gate—an early chase alongside the Seine leans into goofiness, and a nightclub massacre stuffed with CGI blood splatter and frantic fisticuffs comes off as try-hard—but soon Emmanuel’s semi-insouciant performance takes hold and matters settle down. Whether Woo has mellowed out in his old age or just doesn’t give a damn anymore is an open question, but the film is less fussed-over than usual, and if nothing is really at stake, at least the film doesn’t pretend that anything is. A shootout in a hospital pays homage to Hard-Boiled while lessening the carnage—like Weeble-Wobbles, the nameless henchmen get mowed down and keep popping back up, thanks to bulletproof vests—and if Emmanuel and Sy’s repartee remains superficial throughout, we still get the pleasure of seeing the two actors attempt to out-charm each other.
Like its predecessor, The Killer climaxes with a shootout at a church, and if the finale doesn’t have anything as absurdly delicious as the original’s shot of a Virgin Mary statue getting blown apart in slow-motion while an operatic chorus weeps on the soundtrack, it also shows that Woo can still stage-manage mayhem on a grand scale, as motorcycles evaporate in billowing orange explosions, bullets riddle cemetery headstones, and bodies litter the ground in crucifixion poses. As pulse-quickening as the showdown is, the blood and guts on display are incongruous compared to the laid-back 100 minutes preceding it; without even a whiff of tragedy as underpinning, all the flamboyant violence rings hollow. Redemption in Woo’s classics usually comes only at the cost of life and limb, but this Killer has no need for such passion in its pulp. Still, Woo makes the act of whirling around with pistols in both hands look as cool as ever, and if the 2024 Killer is a pastiche that doesn’t even aim to equal what’s come before, it’s at least proof positive that sleek, overwrought gunplay hits differently when it has an actual point. ■
