Published 23 August 2024, 22:19 IST

Film

The Killer
Director: John Woo
A Better Tomorrow Films and Atlas Entertainment
Streaming on Peacock: 08.23

In late 2023, I had the opportunity to chat with legendary director John Woo, who began his career in Hong Kong, went to Hollywood and changed the face of action filmmaking around the world. One of the key points we discussed was his own cinematic influences, as well as the many younger filmmakers who have been influenced by his work. The reason that I bring this up is because as I watched The Killer, the director’s English language reimagining of his 1989 Hong Kong classic, I couldn’t help but view it through this rather specific lens. 

Nathalie Emmanuel (Fast X, Game of Thrones) stars as Zee, a notorious assassin feared throughout the Parisian underworld and known as The Queen of the Dead. Zee is sent on a hit at a Paris night club by her boss and mentor, Finn (Sam Worthington, Avatar), with a strict understanding that no witnesses can remain alive. When a young singer, Jen (Diana Silvers, Space Force, Booksmart) is caught up in the melee, injured and blinded, Zee has a crisis of conscience and spares her life. This doesn’t go over well at all with Finn or his client, and after it’s made clear that the job will be finished with or without her, Zee goes to the hospital where Jen is set to be eliminated, rescues her and runs. Zee’s actions attract the attention of a sharp police investigator, Sey (Omar Sy, Jurassic World, Lupin), and Zee finds herself pursued by from all sides as she uncovers a dark criminal conspiracy and is forced to confront her own past.

The original version of The Killer was was designed to be Woo’s homage to the gangster films of Martin Scorsese, set in the Hong Kong underworld, and just as Woo was inspired by Scorsese, he has inspired other filmmakers. Woo makes more nods here to those directors who have come after than those before him. It’s hard to watch this intriguing new take on The Killer without spotting Woo’s obvious new homages to Quentin Tarantino (Zee fighting villains in a night club with a Samurai sword), The Wachowskis (lots of all black outfits, including sunglasses and trenchcoats), Steven Soderbergh (split screen sequences explaining careful planning of missions) and more. Above all else, in context, this new film is Woo taking charge of Hollywood’s longstanding desire to remake his film, doing it himself and turning it into less of a direct remake than a wistful look back at a career spanning over 50 years—an aging filmmaker’s way of metaphorically singing My Way. A sequence inside a church that creatively addresses Woo’s trademark use of doves and the original meaning of it, symbolizing spiritual peace and innocence, is surprisingly touching. It’s far more accurate to call it a reimaging of The Killer than a remake,  because apart from the basics of the plot set up, this film bares little resemblance to the original. In their new take on the premise, Woo and his screenwriters, Oscar winner Brian Helgeland (LA Confidential) and the team of Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken (10 Cloverfield Lane) have gone with a vastly different approach, giving it an international flavor and more of a spy movie feel—there’s at least as much of the John Woo who directed Mission: Impossible 2 on display here anything else—and they’ve made the title character a woman and significantly reduced the swaggering machismo factor, as well as addressed the problematic and somewhat condescending portrayal of the singer—the only significant female character in the 1989 version—as a naive and helpless waif. The significantly more complicated plot is convoluted and loses much of the simple appeal of the story, yet it’s not meant as a replacement for that film. In the context of acknowledging a Hollywood career that included Face/Off, there’s something about the added silliness of this version that only enhanced the fun for me. 

Emmanuel is  irresistibly charming as Zee, not even trying to fill the shoes of Chow Yun-fat and creating a new character who is hard underwritten yet more morally grounded and easy to get behind. Sy is likable as the police inspector, and the interplay between the two is quite stong. Silver gives a very satisfying performance as Jen, the one character that is hard to question as being superior to the original version. Worthington’s Irish accent is cringeworthy and cartoonish,  though his acting is solid enough, particularly in the context of such a gleefully over-the-top film, and Angeles Woo (John’s daughter) adds a fun presence as Chi Mai, another assassin. The film is packed with far too many characters to keep them all straight, though most of the cast does solid, if forgettable, work.

The Killer runs a bit long, and it’s certainly nothing particularly new, but it’s a fun guilty pleasure movie that I thoroughly enjoyed as a longtime Woo fan who took joy in seeing all of his distinctive signature elements packed into over big rollicking adventure. If you can turn off your brain and view the movie as what it is, rather than holding it to the same standards as an original than was quite groundbreaking for its time, it’s a lively and diverting ride. –Patrick Gibbs

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The dirty secret of urban hellscape movies drenched in rain and blood is that when it comes down to it, they don’t so much trigger worries about future blight as they do tourism fantasies. (When are theme parks going to figure out that “The Blade Runner Experience” would surely break attendance records?)

Alex Proyas’ 1994 fever dream “The Crow,” adapted from James O’Barr’s graphic novel, understood that appeal implicitly, serving up tactile gothic vengeance in a dashed Detroit with the panache of a circus grotesque. But in our current glut of movie dystopias, we’ve gotten away from that kind of immersive showmanship. Case in point, the dreary, pedestrian and ho-hum retelling of O’Barr’s story, also called “The Crow,” this time directed by Rupert Sanders. It’s like an anti-entertainment protest.

This time around, the wraithlike Bill Skarsgård is our back-from-the-dead avenger. But before he gets to ring his eyes with black paint for a slaydate with crow-powered destiny, he’s given an interminable amount of screen time to be broken, glum Eric, a loner still depressed about the death of his childhood horse (seriously) and whiling away his days in a remote rehab institution where the regulation clothing color is, for some reason, pastel pink. There, he meets musician Shelly (FKA twigs), who’s going through some things herself, namely the fact that some people are trying to kill her. Appealing to his angsty sensitivity, she breaks through his tattooed shell and Eric, smitten and protective, returns the favor by breaking them both out of the facility.

Their holed-up bliss — it’s like some insufferable audition for “Euphoria” — is halted when the henchmen of Shelly’s supernaturally evil benefactor Mr. Roeg (Danny Huston, who else?) catch up to the lovers, killing them both. Eric emerges, though, in an abandoned-rail yard netherworld teeming with crows, a dismal space where a middle-aged guide (Sami Bouajila) informs Eric he can rescue Shelly from Hell if he goes back and gets his fury on. Big plus for our boy: can’t be killed. Big minus for us: zero stakes, plus it’ll be more than an hour before any retaliation begins.

By then, when the flat gray murk of Steve Annis’ cinematography and Robin Brown’s production design have dulled your senses, you’ll be hungry for stunts and what a samurai sword can do. For the carnage queens out there, the film’s opera-house set piece probably won’t disappoint (it won’t transcend, either), but the part where invincible Eric is nonetheless supposed to feel pain — something the late Brandon Lee made so palpably human — is an afterthought.

The love story supposedly generating all this ultraviolence is hardly captivating, and the motive behind Shelly’s killing even less so. For all we know, Eric’s payback may be as much about that horse as Shelly, a thinly realized character who will ultimately neither help nor harm twigs’ brand as an entrancing art polymath. Huston’s ready-made villainy won’t suffer either, although I’m pretty sure a shot of him closing his eyes — ostensibly in monstrous reverie — is really just an attempt to remember better gigs.

The one who should worry is Skarsgård, a talented actor with a commanding physicality and haunted eyes, but who’s still trapped in the star-tryout phase of his post-“It” breakout success. With a weak, unimaginative script by Zach Baylin and William Schneider doing him no favors, Skarsgård looks as lost as the pre-reborn Eric, never mustering enough mythic power. Despite the high body count, consider this a murder of “The Crow.”