The Killer (1989)
Chow Yun-Fat is a beautiful man. In The Killer, the 1989 movie where John Woo turned him into an icon, Chow looks more like a classic romantic leading man than an action star. His hair is always perfectly in place. He wears impeccably tailored suits, which often end up covered in blood. His eyes dance. Cary Grant is the comparison everyone makes, and Cary Grant is the exact right comparison. The Killer had moments of operatic tragedy, and Chow treated those moments with gravity. Most of the time, though, he didn’t seem to take anything seriously, even when he was gunning down a room full of anonymous rent-a-henchmen.
To enjoy The Killer, you can’t just suspend disbelief; you have to utterly eradicate it. It’s the story of a hit man so consumed with guilt from accidentally blinding a nightclub singer during a gunfight that he becomes her guardian angel, putting his own life at risk time and again so that he can get her the cornea-transplant surgery she needs to restore her sight. It’s also the story of a renegade cop who starts out completely driven to bring the killer to justice and who then recognizes him as a fellow warrior spirit, helping him shoot down the small army of mob underlings who have come to kill him. There’s a scene where Danny Lee, playing Detective Li Ying, describes Chow’s character to a police sketch artist; he doesn’t give a physical description so much as he writes a love poem to Chow: “He’s very calm, quite intelligent. His eyes are very alert, full of compassion, full of passion.” Watching it, you kind of get where Lee is coming from. He’s right.
The movie itself plays a bit like that piece of dialogue. The Killer is violent as all hell, but there’s no real grit to it. Instead, it treats Chow as a human work of art. He moves with a dancer’s grace. During the opening shoot-out, there’s a moment where he finds himself out of bullets, in a room full of people he’s already killed and people still trying to kill him. He spots a revolver on a nearby table, so he kicks the table, which flips the gun into the air. He catches the gun, aims it, and shoots the guy trying to shoot him. He does all of it in one fluid motion. It’s breathtaking. The Killer is full of moments like that.
John Woo had already started to change the way action movies—shoot-outs in particular—looked before he made The Killer. Woo had been working in Hong Kong movies since the late ’60s, but most of that time, he’d been a fairly anonymous studio cog. That changed in 1986 with A Better Tomorrow, the monster-hit crime movie that made Chow a star in Hong Kong and introduced the melodramatic bullet-ballet style that will always define Woo for most of us. And the influence was immediate. Crime shoot-’em-ups exploded in Hong Kong, and I’d argue that even something like the great train-station shoot-out in Brian De Palma’s The Untouchables, from 1987, could’ve been Woo-influenced. But The Killer is the movie that pushed Woo’s style to new levels of operatic absurdity, the one that other directors spent years attempting to equal.
Woo had his own influences, of course. He talked about The Killer as his homage to both Martin Scorsese and Jean-Pierre Melville, whose Le Samourai also told the story of a glamorous and principled hit man. There’s also plenty of Sergio Leone in Chow’s laconic intensity, and plenty of Sam Peckinpah in Woo’s over-the-top shoot-outs and heavy use of slow motion. But Woo was still an original. More than any other director, he figured out how to make a gunfight look stylish and beautiful and mythic. He’s a show-off, and his action scenes tend to go on forever, escalating and becoming more unreal as they unfold. His action scenes never feel like breaks in the story or even crescendos; they’re just natural extensions of the grand, tragic, dramatic stories that he loves to tell.
In The Killer, Woo did everything he could to detach the movie, visually and auditorily, from reality. He filmed the entire movie in light so soft that it almost looked like there was Vaseline on the lens. He let his camera swoop through hallways and down sidewalks in ways that always drew attention to themselves. He set the whole thing to Lowell Lo’s synthy, ethereal, positively soothing score. And he treated his characters less like human beings and more like avatars of virtue. In The Killer, one mobster lectures another on “the meaning of ethics and honor” while Chow tells his new policeman friend that “very few people still believe in the old ways” of crime, the codes that used to govern the taking of lives. They talk like Old West gunslingers or aging samurai facing changing worlds, seeing degradation instead of progress.
The movie’s plot is a bit of a dance, and all the characters have their own motivations. Chow wants the money so that he can save his accidental victim’s vision—and so that he can, ultimately, at least begin to atone for his life of murder. Lee wants to bring Chow to justice, but he also respects his code of ethics and, in the end, goes to war alongside him, helping Chow and the singer Jenny to escape the hordes of murderers sent by the sniveling, self-centered mobster who’s refusing to pay Chow for that one last job. In one standout scene, Chow and Lee hold each other at gunpoint, trading jibes while pretending, for the sake of the sightless Jenny, that they’re just old friends. Both of them seem to enjoy the charade.
It’s all beautifully ridiculous: the macho notions of honor, the dream-state tone, the iconic Chow performance. But the real reason The Killer has a place in history is its gunfights. For my money, there’s never been another director who’s staged mayhem better than Chow has. And the final gunfight—the slow-mo doves-in-the-chapel blood-fest that everyone envisions when they hear Woo’s name—is a masterpiece. Chow’s creamy-white suit becomes a bloody mess almost immediately. He and Lee bicker, but they stay on the same side. And henchmen attack in wave after wave, crashing through windows and falling from scaffolding and flying across the room as shards of wood explode ecstatically around them. (All these guys are dying, incidentally, because the evil mob boss doesn’t want to pay Chow the $100,000 he owes. His economics seem faulty.) Very few directors have ever managed to film an action scene that brutally gorgeous since. Many, many have tried.