John Woo’s remake relies on style

John Woo’s Hollywood remake of his 1989 masterpiece “Heroic Bloodshed” The Killerwhich languished in development hell for almost as long as the original has existed, finally sees the light of day. Woo moves the setting from Hong Kong to Paris, but otherwise stays true to the original story, in which the hitwoman Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel) accidentally blinds the passerby Jenn (Diana Silvers) during a murder and her refusal to murder the woman in order to settle open questions ultimately leads her into an unusual alliance with the noble police officer Sey (Omar Sy).

Woo wastes little time showcasing his visual signatures, filling the first few minutes of The Killerfinds Zee in a church, with gliding tracking shots and low-angle compositions that instantly establish Zee and Sey as heroes. Oh, and there are pigeons—or at least one pigeon and two pigeons. The action also comes early and often, and Woo still delivers it with panache.

For example, when Zee’s handler Finn (Sam Worthington) realizes that she won’t kill Jenn, putting her in danger, he quickly plans an assassination attempt on her, which degenerates into a chase that leads back to the hospital where Jenn is recovering, where a massive shootout ensues. Woo deftly tracks these interlocking scenes, first causing numerous vehicles to flip and spin on crowded streets before the shootout uses an earlier mapping of the space in Jenn’s ward to lead the viewer through the corridors as both Zee and Sey dive in and out of cover while henchmen are hurled into walls and through windows by gunfire.

Likewise, Woo’s old-fashioned methods that once seemed ballet-like on film—generous coverage with variable frame rates, heavy use of slow motion to linger in midair as characters fly through the air with weapons drawn—lose some of their elegance on digital. While his manipulation of film speed often resulted in blurry, sometimes impressionistic movements, the faster and more precise handling of the same changes on digital results in sudden, jerky movements. Woo’s penchant for filling the frame with sparks and explosions, on the other hand, becomes distracting, as the camera renders every tiny detail of muzzle flash or electrical discharge so vividly that it draws the eye away from the larger flow of a given action.

More pressingly, this remake lacks the much richer character development that made the original as much a melodrama as a shooter. The 1989 film quickly established the relationships between the three main characters, then complicated them until it became difficult to distinguish platonic friendship, professional respect, and even romantic intrigue. Here, Zee, Sey, and Jenn are only superficially sketched, while Emmanuel, Sy, and Silvers spit out their lines with perfunctory, plot-propelling monotony. Zee is particularly confusing given the naivety this experienced assassin regularly displays, and compared to the more cynically aware triad politics of the original, Zee’s relationship with Finn is oddly docile and childlike, with the killer regularly pleading with doe-eyed innocence for reassurance that her victims “deserve to die.”

The 1989 film understood the moral lethargy barely concealed behind the façade of professional honor, culminating in an agonizing finale that confronted its dubious heroes with the violent end that awaited their violent lives. The remake, however, goes out on a limb, confirming Zee’s self-exonerating ethical denial with a more hopeful conclusion that, in context, feels dishonest and condescending.