First things first: it will be important to remember, going forward, that John Woo’s 2024 movie The Killer, despite being a remake of his 1989 film The Killer, is, beyond some details of narrative, not remotely the same movie. It’s also not remotely as good, but that would be impossible under any circumstances: the original is a bona fide masterpiece that permanently altered the course of cinema, specifically action cinema, helped make its star Chow Yun-fat an international superstar, and cemented Woo as a modern master — up to that point, perhaps the modern master of action movies. Woo’s greatness and the greatness of his 1989 film are both undeniable, and nothing could ever come close to recreating that alchemy. So, what do we do about this new remake?
In brief: Nathalie Emmanuel plays Zee, a professional assassin who’s been contracted by her handler Finn (Sam Worthington, affecting an Irish accent while on sabbatical from Pandora) to kill a drug dealer. Much like in the original film, the hit takes place in a nightclub where a young woman, Jenn (Diana Silvers), is singing torch songs. In the ensuing fracas, Jenn is blinded, and Zee, overwhelmed by guilt — and perhaps love — decides to protect Jenn from the turncoats who’ve both double-crossed her and are after the girl. The only help might come from a tough, dedicated, but deeply honest cop named Say (Omar Sy).
That roughly approximates the broad strokes of the 1989 movie, too. But even setting aside the obvious differences of this film’s films gender-swapped lead character and the general lack of a love story between the titular killer and blinded victim, almost nothing in this remake is similar in either detail and tone. The original is a smoldering, swooning romantic tragedy, absolutely oozing a very recently invented action style and drawing direct parallels to romantic crime dramas of cinema’s classic past like Le Samourai. Woo was a hungry young pioneer when he made that film. This The Killer is the work of an older and clearly more sensitive filmmaker, one who has not at all rejected his love of beautiful screen violence but perhaps no longer finds the same romance in death and heroic bloodshed. To that end, this The Killer is closer in tone to a caper, significantly more lighthearted, defiant of the original’s tragedy in favor of something like an attempt at rebirth for Woo and his project.
Is it successful? Well, unfortunately, not really. Emmanuel and Sy are perfectly capable, but by now the nuts and bolts of their characters have progressed far beyond mere cliché and here feel like lazily unreconstructed tropes. She’s lonely, he’s honest, and maybe they will make for unlikely friends. For her part, Silvers seems unproductively anonymous, more MacGuffin than symbol of redemption — the pursuit of which is missing for both of the two buddy-adversaries.
And what of Woo’s justly venerated action? First, there’s not quite enough of it. Aside from a mid-movie shootout in a hospital — which perhaps unwisely reminds viewers of another of Woo’s Hong Kong masterpieces — there’s not much action between the opening nightclub shootout and a climax that, as in the original, takes place in abandoned church, but is more of a hand-to-hand fight scene than the earlier film’s one-against-one-hundred shootout opera. That said, what is present here is very identifiably Woo, although he’s swapped out his penchant for cutting between multiple angles and film speeds and turned more toward speed ramping effects to amplify his performers’ movements and create their kinetic momentum. Perhaps that’s why it feels all of a piece while still lacking in the intensity that actual cuts provide.
Ultimately, there’s a measure of cinephilic intrigue to the project that should keep viewers’ interest, with Woo finally taking it upon himself to return to his own legacy after other filmmakers toiled for years trying to produce a remake of the 1989 movie. The order order was always going to be tall, and no one should have expected any comparison of the latest The Killer to its namesake to be fair. But even on its own merits, this 2024 iteration is an inferior work of action, despite its measurable charm. Still, if the result may not be the career summation it could have been, it’s at least a movie made by a director attempting productively to reflect and revise, which is no small thing.
DIRECTOR: John Woo; CAST: Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy, Sam Worthington, Éric Cantona, Diana Silvers; DISTRIBUTOR: Peacock; STREAMING: August 23; RUNTIME: 2 hr. 6 min.
