“The Killer” International Poster
Director: John Woo
Cast: Omar Sy, Nathalie Emmanuel, Diana Silvers, Sam Worthington, Eric Cantona, Aurélia Agel, Tchéky Karyo, Saïd Taghmaoui, Angeles Woo
Running Time: 126 min.
By Paul Bramhall
Chances are if you’re a fan of Hong Kong action cinema, then John Woo’s 1989 classic The Killer is part of the reason why. In the 35 years since there’s been multiple attempts at a Hollywood remake – in the 1990’s Richard Gere and Denzel Washington were frequently attached to a script penned by Walter Hill and David Gilder. In the early 2010’s Jung Woo-sung was set to make his English language debut in a version helmed by John H. Lee planned to be shot in 3D. Then in the mid-2010’s John Woo expressed his own desire to direct the remake, one which was eventually slated to star Lupita Nyong’o, however the COVID-19 pandemic put the project on ice. The one common factor each failed attempt shared was a collective sigh of relief from the originals loyal fanbase, with the general consensus being that it was one of those movies that should be left alone.
However Hollywood doesn’t work that way, so in 2024 the remake eventually hit the screens – the screens of Peacock subscribers to be precise, which for those living outside of the U.S. (which includes myself), is a U.S. only streaming service. It was an unceremonious release, not only skipping cinemas, but arriving on a platform that has just 34 million subscribers, a number that Netflix’s global reach of 277 million dwarfs in comparison. However, it does have John Woo at the helm, and it does resemble the remake he started talking about in the mid-2010’s. For the first time since 1991’s Once a Thief Woo returns to Paris, and stepping into the role of Chow Yun Fat is Nathalie Emmanuel (Megalopolis) as the titular killer, with Omar Sy (Jurassic World Dominion) cast as the cop Danny Lee played in the original.
In a way it’s a shame Woo’s remake has taken as long as it did to complete, since in the last 10 years there’s been a slew of female assassin movies coming out of Hollywood (in the 2020’s alone we’ve had Maggie Q in Protégé, Mary Elizabeth Winstead in Kate, Karen Gillan in Gunpowder Milkshake, Jessica Chastain as Ava, and Jennifer Lopez in Mother), so what would of had a chance of still feeling fresh in the mid-2010’s, now feels like just another straight-to-streaming female assassin flick. Still, this is a John Woo movie, and perhaps against the odds the good news is that it still feels like one.
The core story in the remake remains the same, albeit with some tweaks. During one of Emmanuel’s hits in a shady club a young singer from America, played by Diana Silvers (Birds of Paradise), falls and hits the back of her head, the impact causing swelling on the optic nerves which leads to her losing her sight. Despite her handlers order to leave no one alive, Emmanuel takes pity on Silvers and lets her live, assuming she was just an innocent bystander caught in the crossfire. However when it turns out Silvers also had ties to the criminals she took out, soon Emmanuel finds herself in the crosshairs of a persistent cop (played by Omar Sy), while being pressured from her handler, played by an Irish accent sporting Sam Worthington (Hacksaw Ridge), to finish the job.
The understated romance of the original is swapped out in the remake for more of a guardian-based relationship, with Emmanuel seeing aspects of her junkie mother in Silvers, a connection that compels her to protect the one she’s supposed to kill, even when it puts her own life in danger. Unfortunately onscreen its clunkily handled, largely down to a script that’s horrendously inconsistent. At times it has a certain charm, almost as if the English subtitles for one of Woo’s classic actioners have been used for the actual English dialogue (at one point Emmanuel yells “You deserve this death!” while pumping a bad guy full of bullets), however a lot of the time it’s plain awful. There are 2 separate scenes between a pair of characters where the line “what about you?” feels like its repeated every few seconds, coming across like it’s been generated by AI rather than one of the three screenwriters attributed to the script.
Even with a better script though Silvers performance makes the character hard to care about, and out of all the casting for the remake, she suffers the most by stepping into the shoes of Sally Yeh. Her blinded singer simply doesn’t seem all that impacted by her sudden loss of sight, and her sob story of how she ended up in Paris doesn’t carry any weight to it, making her feel more like a necessary plot device than a character. Ironically when it comes to the performances, it’s ex-soccer player Eric Cantona (who starred in his own Chinese movie in 2023 with Magic Seven) who owns the screen whenever he’s on it, chewing the scenery as a gangster who’s lost a significant stash of cocaine, and has enlisted Worthington to help find those responsible. Whenever he’s onscreen he bristles with a quelled rage that feels like it could erupt at any time, and I wish we’d seen more of him.
Woo (and HK cinema from the 1980’s in general) has always had a tendency to lean into melodrama, and often it worked when set against a backdrop of 80’s canto-pop and Hong Kong neon, however in the cold light of 2024 and flat digital cinematography, it doesn’t quite have the same impact. A scene where Emmanuel brings Silvers to the abandoned church (of course) where she conducts her business dealings stands out as a cringe inducing misfire, asking Silvers to sing while she lifts a gun to the back of her head, only to start crying while Silvers is mid-song and not be able to go through with it.
At the end of the day though this is a remake of The Killer, and on that token it’s a non-negotiable that the action plays just as important a part at propelling the plot forward as the script. While the doves and slow motion are an integral part of Woo’s style, I often feel that the action directors get overlooked in the directors classic Hong Kong work. It was legendary names like Blacky Ko, Stephen Tung Wai, Tony Ching Siu-Tung and Phillip Kwok who created the bullet riddled heroic bloodshed mayhem of Woo’s best work, and they deserve just as much credit for the iconic action as Woo himself. They leave big shoes to fill, and here the action is in the hands of no less than 4 fight choreographers (+ 2 assistant fight choreographers) and 2 stunt coordinators, and they understandably opt for a “John Woo’s Greatest Hits” approach, harking back to some of the distinctive action beats from his best work.
We get a hospital shootout, a motorbike taking a shotgun blast mid-air and bursting into flames, and characters blasting away with a pistol in each hand. By now Woo’s style has been copied so much that it should by rights be impossible to recreate the feel of his late 1980’s and early 1990’s defining works, and while the action here is expectedly a shadow of that era, it also still has the distinctive Woo touch to it. There’s a couple of stellar vehicular crashes in slow motion that are a joy to watch, done without the assistance of CGI, and I’ve always appreciated how Woo crafts shootouts in a way that the environments they take place in get shot up just as much as the people in them.
Unfortunately for the finale, after a promising start in a cemetery, once proceedings move indoors Woo makes the inexplicable decision to do away with the guns, and opt for a 2 on 2 hand to hand fight pitting Emmanuel and Sy against Worthington and stuntwoman Aurélia Agel (Black Widow). It’s the kind of regrettable end that also plagued both Manhunt and Paycheck, with the slow motion going from enhancing the action to working against it, and one particular move from Emmanuel is sure to draw unintentional laughter. While most will be hoping for a dose of heroic bloodshed, instead we get a run of the mill fight scene that feels like it could have been from any Hollywood movie made in recent years. That’s not necessarily the worst thing in the world, but it’s not what you’d expect from a John Woo flick.
It’s always interesting when directors from Asia remake their own movies for an English audience, from the Pang Brothers with Bangkok Dangerous, to Hideo Nakata with The Ring Two, and now John Woo with The Killer. At one point a character mentions how the abandoned church Emmanuel conducts her dealings in is slated to become a Starbucks, and in many ways its a fitting comparison to the remake. We may want to still worship at the alter of John Woo, but the era we long for has long gone, and the finely crafted masterpieces from the 20th century are now replaced by mass produced commercially appealing replicas. However there’s also a reason why there are so many Starbucks – people like them and they provide the caffeine fix most of us need – and taken from that perspective, within the context of the time it was made in, the 2024 version of The Killer isn’t the travesty that many were expecting.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5.5/10
Still a bit generous with the score , it’s not the worst thing I’ve seen this year but it’s still disappointing to see Woo directing low budget affairs now. If they were gonna shoot in France maybe an easy going romcom remake of Once a thief would have been better seeing how Woo gives off old man energy in his movies now.
At least it’s not The Crow
I like the Starbucks comparison. If the original film is a high quality cafe without any commercialization, this movie is a nearby place that gives me my fix. Other people may think that translates to the film being soulless and without anything redeeming, but I’d consider that an exaggeration.
I know one of the reasons why The Killer is so great is because it’s poetic while The Killer ‘24 isn’t, but I appreciated the little nuances in the film such as showing how Zee followed in her mother’s footsteps and became a junkie and was trafficked before becoming a professional killer. I liked knowing more about her.
While she and Omar Sy didn’t have the same friendship as Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee, I liked the references with how Omar Sy can’t go after high profile criminals without approval while Emmanuelle doesn’t have those restrictions. I thought their respect for each other was convincing.
I’ve heard other people say that Ching Siu-Tung and company don’t get credit for Woo’s films, and they certainly did contribute as film is a collaborative process, but as you already know, when you look at Ching Siu-Tung’s attempts at Gun Fu in Wonder Seven and The Blacksheep Affair, his gunfights are the type of thing one would see in a Rob Liefeld comic, where they’re fun and zany, but not what Woo would do.
There’s a reason why Woo isn’t credited as the action choreographer, but those guys helped create those action scenes to his specifications, and didn’t just push him aside and take over like with other HK films.
I enjoyed the variety of action in the film, and the fight scene with Emmanuelle vs Agel was my jam with how she did the capoeira move, martelo de chão before both ladies transitioned into jiujitsu. It was a better Black Widow fight scene than Marvel’s film about her showcased.
People are so used to “tactical” gunfights these days, that I enjoy seeing Woo’s action come more to the forefront in recent years, and I hope other film makers take note and keep the bullet ballet alive.