I’m not usually a big fan of remakes of action films, especially ones from other countries like Hong Kong, as they typically lose something as US filmmakers try to reinterpret it for this Western US audience. Yet this one piqued my interest since John Woo is remaking his classic for a new audience. The Killer is one of the films that changed action cinema with how it portrayed gun use which ended up being called Gun-Fu at times to influence the world. The mid to late 80s to 90s was a rebirth for Hong Kong action cinema as it moved from just martial arts wuxia period pieces to those set in modern-day crime epics filled with action that, when watching at the time or shortly after, people in Hollywood couldn’t conceive of. Seeing John Woo’s The Killer back then felt like a smack to the face with awesomeness. With this, A Better Tomorrow and later Hard Boiled Chow Yun Fat became a new type of Asian action hero that won’t beat you up but will shoot you a way that looks so cool that your VCR would freeze from the iciness. Over time, John Woo has come to the West, brought some of his aesthetics to Hollywood, and influenced so many others, from The Matrix through to John Wick (Keanu is probably the West’s gun action GOAT), we come to this version. Thirty-five years after the original came out, we have Woo and screenwriters, Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, and Matt Stuecken, who updated the story and placed it in the famous European locale of Paris.
Here, Nathalie Emmanuel plays Zee, a professional assassin who is the best at what she does and has a very strict moral and ethical ideology for her profession. Zee does jobs for Finn (Sam Worthington), an Irish criminal middleman who gets things done for the many criminal groups in Paris. After a job causes a young woman named Jenn (Diana Silvers) is blinded, Zee begins to question who she’s working for after they push her to kill the young singer. This connects them to Parisian Police Detective Sey, played by Omar Sy, who is on a case about a missing shipment of heroin and a perp he has to take out after they took a hostage. Much like in the original, Zee and Sey end up having a kind of friendship, but this is through mutual respect for each other’s skill and less of the killer feeling they understand the world better than the policeman. Here, Zee and Sey are very much equals and prefer to handle things entirely differently. Sy, I think, helps because he’s so damn charismatic. If you liked him in Lupin on Netflix, he’ll feel familiar and crack his know-it-all smirk. Woo also uses his large stature well in his action setpieces. There are many times when he steals the screen from everyone else on screen, even the star, Emmanuel.
Speaking of Emmanuel, here she gets to be something different from how we usually see her in projects. While she’s still beautiful, she also gets to be so damn cool-looking. Zee gets to do the type of action that makes it feel like Emmanuel is having a ball doing it. They make some apparent differences in how Zee differs from Chow Yun-fat’s Ah Jong and how they change the story to a more modern time and a different location. Here, there is no love story between the killer and the blind woman or even some weird patronizing dynamic between the cop and the killer. While it does take some story choices that feel very familiar and also feel referential to Woo’s own work, for me, it’s very entertaining. I had fun watching it as I thought Woo while working under the constraints of the TV movie version of his earlier film, doubled down in some of his visual ticks.
You’re going to get the diving with two guns blasting. You are going to get birds and churches with one versus a bunch of fully covered grunts getting shot and blown up all over the place. Yes, there will be swords and knives and hurracarranas while shooting all throughout. The bad guys are going to be over the top and easy to catch. That will have you wondering why the main characters don’t see the double cross, but it all doesn’t matter because, in the end, it still looks cool. It’s the one thing that Woo can do to top everyone else. His people look cool all the time. They dress immaculately and move immaculately as well. They kill people in ways that you know, inspire others in a way visually that can only be compared to how a good hip-hop producer can chop up a sample into an amazing beat. It doesn’t matter if he uses the same drums all the time; they are still crafted amazingly. The Killer is a film that, if you have Peacock, you should definitely take time out to watch. If you don’t have Peacock, go find someone with an account and have a fun movie night like you would back when Blockbuster was around, and you might’ve discovered the original film on the shelf and rented it for a surprisingly nice Friday or Saturday movie night.
Score: B
