John Woo turns action opera into streaming pop with his generic remake of The Killer

An English-language remake of John Woo’s 1989 Hong Kong action opera The Killer has been in the works almost since the epic bromance between Chow Yun-fat’s hitman and Danny Lee’s pursuing detective hit the big screen. But after decades of studio fumbling, John Woo did what the bad guy in any DTV action movie would do: He pushed his henchman aside and said, “Fine, I’ll do it myself.” Much like a schlock villain’s final stand, Woo’s loose remake of The Killer puts up more of a fight than you’d expect before inevitably falling to truisms. Just as crime doesn’t pay, you can’t shoot the same bullet twice.

Here, the bullets are mostly shot by the Paris-based assassin Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel), though she also boasts a vial of poison and a 3D-printed samurai sword in her arsenal. That’s the first indication that Woo’s firearm romantics have faded over the years. In the original Killer, Chow Yun-fat stares at a selection of handguns like they’re photos of his children. He responds to questions by playing the harmonica and staring out the window. He pours out his soul in every conversation, just as he empties his clip into every goon. Despite the presence of bird-filled churches and its disregard for realism, the remake doesn’t maintain this melodrama.

Instead, Emmanuel’s hired deathdealer is one of your standard, John Wick-influenced savants. She twirls and slices and shoots, but is never coaxed towards the kind of grace that led Woo’s films to be dubbed “bullet ballets.” If you thought John Woo knew about reloading, you’d expect Emmanuel to swap mags with the same mechanical prowess as Keanu. She cuts through endless swarms of French creeps entertainingly enough—especially as the film dresses her in a variety of disguises, ranging from Goth Carmen Sandiego to Catwoman With Guns—but her intensity is as basic as Woo’s watered-down late-era style.

As The Killer marches us through its over-plotted drug saga, a cycle of thieving and counter-thieving and counter-counter-thieving, Woo weighs the film’s plodding two hours down with far too many split-screened flashbacks. Around those flashbacks and blurred, digitized pans are small servings of more palatable excess: slow-motion violence and beautifully silly fades, flourishes that actually stand apart from, rather than play into, what’s become standard for the genre. I don’t even hate the split-screens! It’s the constant backtracking and explanation that slams this film into a brick wall, sapping it of Woo’s depleted energy and making it into a more anonymous thriller. Even the excessive saxophone of the overbearing score can’t trick you into thinking things are lively.

Despite the back-and-forth dithering of The Killer’s script, at its heart is a simple story: Zee is being used by her handler Finn (Sam Worthington, armed with a bad Irish accent and a worse Irish catchphrase), who is being used by a handler of his own. Nobody likes it when Zee’s conscience gets the better of her and she spares the life of Jenn (Diana Silvers), a moll Zee accidentally blinds during a hit. Nobody but Inspector Sey (Omar Sy), that is, who starts picking up the scent of the whole enterprise. Together Zee and Sey team up to protect Jenn, who of course knows too much and is therefore a target for dozens of well-armed thugs.

If The Killer stuck to its guns, the cat-and-mouse chemistry between Sy and Emmanuel is charmingly goofy enough to propel us through a few bystander-blasting shootouts. Sy uses his sheer size to chuck underlings through furniture, and Emmanuel gets to do those face-first John Woo dolphin dives, pistols akimbo. 

But the film can’t stop splitting the difference between dissonant remnants of Woo’s baroque sentimentality (Zee lighting a candle for each life she takes) and snarky Hollywood action idiocy. This is the kind of movie where someone jots down Zee’s alias “Juline Noone,” then separates it into “No/One,” then underlines each word, shaking their head and smirking at the clever crook who’s outfoxed them with such a witty alias.

Less pleased with itself but no less generic is writing that reduces Jenn to a plot device. (Silvers, for her part, is simply not very good at pretending she can’t see.) This saps the stakes of emotion; the connection between criminal and innocent victim are no longer explained in poetic asides where guilt and affection compound upon each other, but cheaply defined in literal terms. Jenn reminds Zee of her sister, and is therefore worth saving. “Heroic bloodshed” loses its mystique, replaced by blunt screenwriterly motivation. Sometimes the idiocy and sentiment combine in an orange-juice-and-toothpaste combo, like when the film screeches to a halt in order for a pair of glorified extras to sit around and discuss how Zee’s legendary prowess earned her the nickname “the Queen of the Dead.”

This tonal unevenness strands the film’s more ambitious, more outrageous images—like Zee sprinting across pew-tops, or a lackey swinging a censer around like a flail—in a movie that is otherwise too straitlaced for its own good. These sequences are mere moments of admirable absurdity rather than sublime arias in a ballistic opera.

The classic hitman tale is one of class revolt: The low-ranking killers with all the skills are exploited and lied to by their fatcat bosses, until they realize that they don’t need to put up with their shit anymore. The Killer feints towards this path like it feints towards Woo’s original thesis that honor could forge an undeniable bond between people on opposite sides of the law. But the straight-to-streaming remake doesn’t have any ideas or emotions, just facsimiles of ideas and emotions. It has setpieces, at least, but even its graveyard and hospital-set shootouts are greatest hits, croaked out by an aging rock star. Woo’s Hong Kong work helped change the way action movies looked. The Killer is evidence that action movies are fighting back, wrestling Woo into standardized submission. And yet, you still admire the romantic dedication the director has to filming acts of principled violence. Woo seems to embody his killer’s notion that, though it’s easy to pick up a gun, it’s hard to put it back down.

Director: John Woo
Writer: Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken
Starring: Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy, Sam Worthington, Diana Silvers, Saïd Taghmaoui, Hugo Diego Garcia
Release Date: August 23, 2024 (Peacock)