‘The Killer’: John Woo Remakes His 1989 Action Classic

There’s arguably nothing cooler than The Killer or its star Chow Yun-fat, so John Woo’s new remake of his 1989 Hong Kong classic begins behind the proverbial eight-ball.

The action maestro’s latest is, mercifully, a cut above last year’s Silent Night, boasting at least faint traces of the signature style that made him a genre legend. Still, despite being a step in the right direction, his English-language The Killer, which hits Peacock on Aug. 23, remains merely a mediocre remix that, for all its familiar elements, fails to improve upon a single aspect of its trailblazing predecessor.

In contemporary Paris, lethal assassin Zee (Game of Thrones’ Nathalie Emmanuel)—who’s described as a “monk without a God”—sits quietly in a dilapidated church, clapping to awaken its resident doves and pigeons, which flutter about as the director’s camera rotates and rises into the sky.

This is pure, unadulterated Woo iconography, and he indulges in additional trademarks throughout, from slow-motion and whiplash pans to split-screens and transitional wipes. There’s also, of course, plenty of gunfights and explosions involving skilled killers, some of whom ride on (and go flying and skidding off) motorcycles, although cinematographer Mauro Fiore’s visuals have the colorful flatness of a television drama.

Whereas Woo’s original was enhanced by a gauzy, woozy aesthetic that cast it as a melodramatic fairy tale, this film takes a more realistic approach to its story, which renders its plot points implausible and silly.

On the banks of the Seine, noble police officer Sey (Omar Sy) and his partner Jax (Grégory Montel) pull over a suspected heroin dealer. A shootout and chase ensues, concluding with Sey offing the perp before he has a chance to murder a child he’s taken hostage. This earns Sey reprisals from his bosses, and it shakes things up at a nightclub where Zee has arrived to carry out an execution ordered by her handler Finn (Sam Worthington).

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Wielding a samurai sword, Zee terminates with extreme prejudice, but in the process, an American lounge singer named Jenn (Diana Silvers) is blinded. Momentarily possessed by compassion, Zee lets Jenn live, and that turns out to be the cause of her subsequent troubles, since Finn wanted everyone in the room dead and—despite Zee’s assumption—he makes clear that Jenn was not an innocent “civilian.”

Convinced that she’s made a mistake, Zee infiltrates a hospital in disguise in order to finish the job, and there she has the first of numerous encounters with Sey, who’s destined to be both her enemy and her mirror image. The Killer’s protagonists share a reasonably playful rapport, but the film undercuts itself from the start by failing to properly justify Zee’s continuing benevolence toward Jenn.

Simply put, there’s no reason for her to care this much about this stranger, and the explanation ultimately provided—that Jenn reminds Zee of the sister she let down—comes across as a pitiful afterthought. Given that keeping Jenn alive is the engine that drives this entire affair, it would have made more sense if Zee was in love with the crooner (à la 1989’s version). As it stands, their dynamic is the weak link that destabilizes everything.

Frustrated with Zee’s refusal to do as he pleases, Finn sends his henchmen to eliminate Jenn, thus instigating a series of skirmishes between his baddies and Zee and Sey, who alternate between sparring with each other and joining forces. The Killer is most entertaining when it drops its convoluted narrative for breakneck thrills shot on-location in Paris, and it has at least a few moments that are impressively over-the-top, including an SUV going airborne on a busy street and a climactic bit of showmanship by Zee, who runs across the tops of church pews, leaps through the sky as she fires her handguns in different directions, and fells multiple assailants while dangling upside down with her legs around the neck of another adversary.

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Woo is often just playing the hits, yet he does so with a vigor that’s been missing from his prior output, and it makes one wish he’d more consistently embraced his lyrical and uninhibited choreographic and storytelling tendencies—as when he overlaps the reflections of Emmanuel and Sy’s faces to underscore their similarity.

Emmanuel and Sy make for a likable pair and both are adept at handling their murderous duties. Nonetheless, the former pales in comparison to her precursor Chow, whose peerlessly fashionable charm and poise (complete with designer suits and perfectly combed hair) is sorely lacking from these proceedings, as is the romantic noir fatalism that made the initial The Killer a worthy kindred spirit to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï.

The film’s script (credited to Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, and Matt Stuecken) complicates matters by revealing that Finn works for gangster Jules (Eric Cantona), who hired Zee for her opening gig in order to recover 100 tons of heroin that was stolen before he received it from a Saudi Arabian prince (Saïd Taghmaoui). The question of who’s backstabbing who, however, proves of little consequence, especially considering that Woo himself appears primarily interested in his vicious centerpieces.

The Killer isn’t a triumphant return to form for its director; running over two hours, it’s plagued by dead spots and diversions that put the brakes to its pandemonium. But it does move him in the right direction, insofar as it allows him to get back to staging the idiosyncratic large-scale mayhem that once made him the toast of Hollywood (courtesy of Hard Target, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible 2).

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A final battle inside Zee’s favorite church (set to a score that occasionally features jazzy horns) is an exercise in the sort of combat and carnage that defined his heyday, and while it’s not the equal of his finest hours—largely because it’s woefully short on balletic gracefulness—it has a muscularity that leans into his stars’ strengths.

At age 77, Woo may never totally regain his mojo. Yet with The Killer, the auteur demonstrates that, like Emmanuel’s badass (and Chow’s before her), he has a few rounds left in his cartridge. Now he just needs a better cinematic weapon with which to use them.

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