John Woo’s remake of his own 1989 Hong Kong action classic The Killer includes a running subplot involving an incomplete crossword puzzle. The title character totes one around, occasionally trying to solve its last remaining clues. And the big answer she finally figures out after much deliberation is “reborn.”
The word holds obvious meaning for an assassin who rediscovers some semblance of her humanity after she begins to protect a woman she accidentally blinded. But it may also mean something to Woo, one of the greatest action directors in the history of cinema who’s spent a lot of the last two decades not making action movies — or at least not the sort of flamboyant, operatic, emotionally and morally fraught action movies that were his trademark in the 1980s and ’90s.
Yes, The Killer could be seen as a step backward for a guy like Woo, who’s undeniably retreading some very familiar territory here. But it’s also a step that Woo takes with grace and obvious excitement, yielding a movie that delivers the same sort of muscular pleasures that John Woo’s name used to guarantee. It’s as if remaking a John Woo movie finally gave John Woo permission to make a true John Woo movie again.
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The broad strokes of 1989’s The Killer are all intact, but many of the specifics are different in the 2024 version. For one thing, the film is set in Paris, rather than Hong Kong, and focuses on a female assassin, played by Nathalie Emmanuel instead of Chow Yun-fat. Her Zee is a classic Woo hero: Deadly, ruthless, but honor-bound to follow a strict moral code. Before she accepts an assignment from Sam Worthington’s Finn, she always asks “Do they deserve this death?” (“I wouldn’t ask you if they didn’t,” is his typical response.)
Finn orders Zee to take out an entire nightclub of crooks, which she does in high style. (She finds an especially impressive way of smuggling a weapon into the place undetected.) But a lounge singer named Jenn (Dianna Silvers) gets caught in the crossfire and loses her vision after a head injury. Zee’s contract stipulates Jenn must die, but Zee can’t bring herself to do it. And when she visits Jenn in the hospital to finish the job, she gets interrupted by Sey (Omar Sy), the Paris cop hot on Zee’s trail, who doesn’t realize the killer he’s hunting is standing right in front of him.
If you have even a passing familiarity with Woo’s Hong Kong movies, you know that Zee and Sey are destined to meet again and again, and that the two will come to see themselves as warped mirror images of the other. In one scene, the new Killer’s script (which is credited to Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, and Matt Stuecken, based on Woo’s original 1989 screenplay) has the characters literally spell out their bond. “You would be me, and I would be you,” they note when they realize how differently their lives could have turned out with just a few twists of fate.
In other words: The Killer ain’t exactly subtle. Then again, Woo’s movies were never known or appreciated for their subtlety. Fans love his elaborate fight scenes, with their jarring physicality and stylized movements and camera angles. In that regard, The Killer remake is Woo’s finest film in many years. The action begins early with Sey chasing a car thief, in a set piece filled with inventive shots and really brutal-looking stunt work. (Watch for that car and the motorcyclist!) Every few minutes, Woo ramps the intensity back up with more shootouts and squibs and slow-motion dives.
While Woo himself was certainly a major reason why the original Killer became a classic, its cast — especially the smoldering Chow Yun-fat — was another huge factor in the film’s success. Emmanuel never quite measures up to Chow in this role, but she’s a solid anti-hero who acquits herself well in her many onscreen chases and battles. The standout is Sy, who does feel like a modern heir to Chow’s gruff yet handsome, take-no-prisoners brand of leading man. The rest of the cast, from Worthington to Said Taghmaoui as a corrupt Middle Eastern prince, understood the assignment, and nail the tone Woo wants (over-the-top melodrama tinged with wry humor) precisely.
Nothing about this is new, but Hollywood makes so few genuinely gritty thrillers these days that it feels novel anyway. The world did not need a remake of The Killer, and it’s possible that if this movie was directed by anyone other than John Woo, it would feel like a desecration of a masterpiece. In Woo’s hands, the material works all over again. I don’t necessarily need to see someone else’s copy of the Mona Lisa, but if you told me they discovered another Mona Lisa that da Vinci painted 30 years after the first one, I’d probably want to take a look at that one too.
RATING: 7/10
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Gallery Credit: Emma Stefansky
