Well, he succeeded at last. After nearly ten years of development, John Woo finally unveiled the American version of The Killer, which has been in the works since the original film’s 1989 premiere. Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee starred in Woo’s original, which was one of the main movies that introduced western film enthusiasts to Hong Kong genre cinema.
It is an amazing feat that is hard to believe was completed in 2024; it now resembles an old cathedral. It’s an amazing action melodrama that is extravagantly violent and bursting at the seams with intense feelings. It’s over the top in every way. “One Vicious Hitman” was the slogan on one of its posters. Just one aggressive police officer. Ten Thousand Shots. To be honest, the math looked a bit too cautious. You would probably have to reengineer human civilization in order to make the same movie today.
All of which is to say that it would be absurd to expect the 77-year-old Woo—who just made his feature film debut with Silent Night last year—to attempt to recreate the same film. Most people didn’t enjoy the movie, but I did.
Fortunately, he hasn’t. With a completely different tone, this new, partially gender-flipped adaptation of The Killer, which is set in France and stars Omar Sy as the obsessive cop chasing Nathalie Emmanuel, has essentially the same plot as the original but a different tone. It forgoes the grand mythmaking, the thick atmosphere, and the florid romanticism in favor of a lighthearted modesty. On its own, it’s silly, entertaining, and insanely violent.
It feels like a betrayal to say this, but Peacock is the place where The Killer is being released direct-to-stream, and that might be the best place for it. For years, the streamers have been attempting to sell us overly large, overly eager action clones who lack creativity or originality. Even when he’s just playing the hits, Woo can still use creativity in his action scenes, even though the new Killer lacks the insane grandeur of the old one.
While some of the new movie’s moves seem like they were made up on the spot, others are lifted directly from the first movie, including a few memorable ones. However, Zee (Emmanuel), the assassin in question this time, is just as skilled with her hands and thighs as she is with guns and rifles. She uses a carbon-fiber samurai sword that is concealed in pieces inside her form-fitting black dress to defeat a whole nightclub full of goons. She puts the sword together while dancing sensually and gyrating with a man she feels like slicing open.
The Killer is full of blood, but Woo also intersperses some of his trademark graphic poetry. A man’s death is accompanied by a crystalline champagne bottle burst in one instance, and an explosion of red flower petals in another.
Those glass fragments cause Jenn (Diana Silvers), a singer who appears naive and happens to be in the room when Zee performs one of her hits, to become blind by accident. Zee has a moral code, even though her profession is brutal. She lights a candle for the dead after every kill, and when she receives an assignment from her boss Finn (Sam Worthington, who has a charmingly ridiculous Irish accent and appears to be having the time of his life), she always asks herself, “Does this man deserve to die?” Our hero has a moral crisis when Finn asks Zee to locate Jenn in the hospital and complete the assignment.
She meets Sey (Omar Sy) in the same way, and he senses right away that there’s more to this woman. Woo has expanded Zee’s backstory by borrowing a few details from Luc Besson’s 1990 film La Femme Nikita. Here, too, is the legendary Tchéky Karyo, who portrayed Anne Parillaud’s cool-as-ice handler Bob in that film. (La Femme Nikita received a Hong Kong remake in 1991; at the time, there was a noticeable tug-of-war between French “cinema du look” and Hong Kong action cinema.)
“My area of expertise is making my actors look amazing,” Woo stated to me during our interview a few years back. “I am skilled at determining the ideal angle to showcase them beautifully.” It is undoubtedly one of his greatest talents. That instinct was what made him transform Chow Yun-fat into a Hong Kong version of Clint Eastwood mixed with Alain Delon and Ken Takakura.
With Emanuel, he tries something new by emphasizing her reserve at first and then her physicality. (He doesn’t have to work too hard to make her appear stunning.) In order to highlight Sy’s six-foot-three stature, he records him from low viewpoints. However, he also manages to catch the performer’s somewhat puzzled look, as though Sey is taking pleasure in Zee’s inability to consistently avoid him.
The fact that the other police officers seem dishonest doesn’t help either; he is attracted to her right away as an equal. It turns into a fun game of cat and mouse as this massive police officer and this sly, slippery criminal trade blows. Since this is The Killer, we can be certain that they will soon begin cooperating to keep Jenn and eventually one another safe.
But let’s get back to the activity. Any Woo movie will succeed or fail based on how well he planned the carnage. There are plenty of action scenes in this new Killer, but they never seem forced or unoriginal. Though this movie is far funnier than the John Wick movies, there’s a sense that every scene has been planned to highlight various abilities, items, and locations, much like in the John Wick movies.
It also seems instinctive rather than preprogrammed. During the period of “heroic bloodshed” in Hong Kong cinema, Woo and his associates created chaos while filming. Sometimes there was no script at all, and other times there was a predetermined script. They would come up with one move, one angle, one shot, and so on, always drawing inspiration from the previous event for the next.
That was the secret to their work, and the reason Woo was one of the few to successfully transition to Hollywood—he was allowed the freedom to express himself creatively, at least in certain productions. It appears that he has discovered a way to regain his sense of independence. When The Killer’s final set piece (which, like the first one, takes place in and around a church) finally appears, we’re left wondering what new creatively ridiculous method of murder we’ll get to witness this time. Woo does not let you down.
