The American remake of the director’s own film avoids flowery romanticism and myth-making and instead relies on light-hearted modesty. It’s great fun.
Photo: Thibault Grabherr/Universal Pictures
Well, he finally did it. John Woo has finally made the American remake of The Killer which has been in the works almost since the first part premiered in 1989. Woo’s original, starring Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee, was one of the key films that introduced Hong Kong genre cinema to Western cineastes. Today it stands like an ancient cathedral, a monumental achievement whose creation is unthinkable in 2024. It is a grandiose action melodrama full of heated emotions and extravagant violence, exaggerated in every imaginable way. One of the slogans on the film’s poster read “A brutal assassin. A merciless cop. Ten thousand bullets.” To be honest, that calculation seemed too conservative to me. To make the same film today, you would probably have to redesign human civilization.
This is all just another way of saying that it would be crazy to expect 77-year-old Woo (who recently returned from a long hiatus with last year’s silent Nighta film I liked but most others didn’t) to try to make the same film again. Thankfully he didn’t. This new, semi-gender-swapped version of The KillerSet in France and starring Nathalie Emmanuel as a skilled assassin and Omar Sy as a cop who obsessively pursues her, it has roughly the same plot as the original but a completely different mood. It forgoes the flowery romance, the dense atmosphere, the grand myth-making, and opts instead for a loose, silly modesty. It’s funny, ridiculous, and insanely violent in its own way.
The Killer will be released direct-to-streaming on Peacock and – it feels like a betrayal to admit – that might actually be the right place for it. Streamers have been trying to sell us bloated, aspirational action clones with no imagination or invention for years. And while this new killer doesn’t have the insane grandeur of the old one, but Woo still knows how to be creative with his action scenes, even when he’s just playing the hits. Some of the moves in the new film are lifted from the previous movie (including a few iconic ones), while others feel like they were invented on the fly. But this time, the assassin in question, Zee (Emmanuel), is as adept with her hands and thighs as she is with pistols and rifles. When she kills an entire nightclub full of thugs, she does so with a carbon fiber samurai sword hidden in pieces inside her skintight black dress, which she puts together while gyrating seductively on the dance floor with a man she’s about to rip to shreds. There’s a lot of blood in The Killerbut Woo also includes moments of his patented cruel poetry. One man’s death is accompanied not by geysers of blood but by an explosion of red flower petals; another’s by the crystal-clear burst of a champagne bottle.
It is these shards of glass that inadvertently blind Jenn (Diana Silvers), a seemingly innocent singer who happens to be in the room when Zee performs one of her hits. We already know that despite her brutal profession, Zee has a moral code: After every murder, she lights a candle for the dead, and her ritual question after receiving an assignment from her boss Finn (Sam Worthington, sporting a charmingly silly Irish accent and clearly having the time of his life) is: “Does this man deserve to die?” When Finn asks Zee to find Jenn in the hospital and finish the job, our heroine has a crisis of conscience. This is also how she meets Sey (Omar Sy), who immediately seems to sense that there is more to this woman. Woo has taken a page or two from Luc Besson’s Nikita’s wife (1990) to flesh out Zee’s backstory. The great Tchéky Karyo, who played Anne Parillaud’s cool handler Bob in that film, even makes an appearance here. (Nikita’s wife got its own Hong Kong remake in 1991; the give and take between Hong Kong action cinema and the French “Cinema du look” movement was quite pronounced at the time.)
“My specialty is that I know how to make my actors look great,” Woo told me when I interviewed him a few years ago. “I know how to find the right angle to make them look beautiful.” That’s really one of his great talents. It was that instinct that led him to turn Chow Yun-fat into a Hong Kong hybrid of Alain Delon and Ken Takakura, with a dash of Clint Eastwood. With Emanuel, he tries something different, emphasizing first her reserve and later her physicality. (He doesn’t have to expend too much extra energy to make her look stunning.) He films Sy from low angles to make the most of the 6-foot-3 actress’s height, but also captures the slightly bewildered expression on the performer’s face, as if Sey enjoys Zee’s ability to constantly escape him. He quickly finds himself drawn to her, as if she’s his equal; The fact that the other police officers appear to be corrupt doesn’t hurt either. The back and forth between this huge police officer and this sneaky, slick criminal becomes a fun game of cat and mouse. This is The Killerso we know they will soon start working together to protect Jenn and ultimately each other.
But back to the plot. Every Woo film will live or die by how he stages the carnage. This new killer is packed with action scenes, and they never seem superficial or generic. As with the John Wick Movies (although this movie is much sillier than the John Wick films), you get the feeling that each sequence was designed to show different skills, objects and locations. But it also all feels intuitive, not programmed. In the era of “heroic bloodshed” of Hong Kong cinema, Woo and his colleagues developed the chaos as they shot. There wasn’t always a set script; sometimes there was no script at all. They thought up a move, a shot, an angle, then thought up another, always using what had just happened as inspiration for the next. That was the key to their art, and it’s also why Woo was one of the few to successfully make the transition to Hollywood; he was given the power (at least in some productions) to work in his own way. It feels like he found a way back to that feeling of freedom. When the crucial set design in The Killer (like the original, it’s set in and around a church) we wonder what new, inventive and crazy way of killing we’ll see this time around. Woo doesn’t disappoint.
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