It’s always a blessing to review a new John Woo film, and to get two in less than a year makes this Year of the Dragon a particularly auspicious one, at least in cinematic terms. After a series of long hiatuses between sleight works like The Crossing and ManHunt, fans of action films have been treated to both the experimental Silent Night (previously reviewed here) and the long-awaited remake of John Woo’s seminal 1989 international smash, The Killer.
Contract-killer Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel) operates out of Paris where she’s directed by her handler, Finn (Sam Worthington). She’s a hired killer with a conscience, of course, and when directed to take out a member of the Parisian drug trade at a jazz club she can’t bear to also finish off Jenn (Diana Silvers), an American singer who has been blinded in the chaos. F
inn wants Jenn dead, sure that she’s more involved in the criminal enterprise than she lets on, but Zee feels too guilty to finish the job and takes it upon herself to protect Jenn from her former employers.
This heroism draws the attention of a headstrong Parisian policeman (Omar Sy), who gradually becomes more sympathetic to Zee as he pursues her.
The big story beats are identical to the original but what distinguishes John Woo’s new version of The Killer is… well, everything else, really.
Woo’s greatest Hong Kong films were made under the specter of the increasing desperation concerning the 1997 handover of the colony from the UK to China. Those stories were tragedies of good people humiliated and destroyed by the powerful and greedy in a world indifferent to their suffering or struggle for redemption.
Thirty-five years later and this most essential element of Woo’s masterpieces is gone from his new work and in its place is a kind of Hitchcockian playfulness. The Killer has been rebuilt as a kind of ersatz romantic comedy.
There’s a layer of cultural authenticity that Woo has lost in this particular translation and it’s turned what used to be hyper-stylized but earnest emotion into slick, Hollywood, style irony and camp. The original film ends with Chow Yun-Fat denied even the cold comfort of paying back the innocent he wounded, and this film ends with smiles.
There is something interesting about recasting these archetypes in a way that the characters are motivated by sexuality rather than obligation (and props to Emmanuel for really selling the element of queer-coded sexual intrigue that goes into Zee’s decision to save Jenn) but it has the unintended consequence of reframing the movie in much more conventional terms and losing a lot of what made Woo’s voice unique in the first place.
That said, in technical terms, this film is fantastic, apart from having the same boring digital “look” that everything shot for streaming does these days.
Woo’s camera is endlessly athletic: swooping around his heroes and villains with the greatest of ease and still giving perfect clarity for geography when the action pops off. The action lacks the emotional weight of his best Hong Kong stuff, but it’s audacious and graceful. I think the highlights actually come pretty early in the film with Inspector Sy’s brutal take down of a suspect turning into a demolition derby and Zee’s rescue of Jenn in the hospital really getting the movie rolling.
The kinetic action is married to some great split screen use and even some lovely suspense moments that cement Woo’s skill as a visual storyteller, even in his works that don’t gel together perfectly.
In a way, this film actually reminds a lot of Antoine Fuqua’s 1998 Woo homage, The Replacement Killers.
In that film all the superficial elements that Woo (and his legion of imitators right up to John Wick) employs are present and accounted for and there’s even Chow Yun-Fat himself there to ground the central performance but without the tragedy, without the earnestness, there’s no skin in the game for the audience.
I feel guilty reviewing the film this way because if it was just the new film from the guys who did Bullet Train I would probably say that it’s a lovely a piece of bubble gum entertainment but coming from John Woo, remaking his own classic and coming off the technical show piece of Silent Night as a dialogue free film, this feels small, quaint, and generic.
It truly does feel like Woo working in the West these days and trying to adapt to their conventions has made him mostly indistinguishable from Western directors trying to ape his glorious style but sand down the rough edges.
The edges were what we were all paying for in the first place, my friends.
Not recommended.
* * * * *
Produced by Charles Roven, Alex Gartner, John Woo, Lori Tilkin deFelice
Screenplay by Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken
Based on The Killer by John Woo
Directed by John Woo
Starring Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy, Sam Worthington,
Diana Silvers, Eric Cantona, Saïd Taghmaoui
The Killer is Currently Streaming on Peacock
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