There’s a remake of 1989’s The Killer in the works, with Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy in lead roles. But can it match up to the original, even with original director John Woo calling the shots.
I believe it’s Emmanuel as the assassin in the update/reimagining, but it was Chow Yun-Fat way back when, as the supercool killer motivated to do “one last job” to raise enough cash to restore the eyesight of an innocent singer who got caught in the crossfire of a previous hit.
Compare and contrast the relative importance of female roles. Blind singer Jennie, played by Sally Yeh, does not do much more than scream and whimper in the 1989 original. She’s a catalyst rather than an agent. Emmanuel, best known from Game of Thrones, is obviously going to play a more decisive role in the update, what with being the titular character and all.
But will John Woo be able to best himself? Is he even going to try? Along with Hard Boiled, The Killer is the pinnacle of Woo’s early Hong Kong period. Those two films are as good as an encyclopaedic entry on his style – the use of slo-mo, classical music, sudden frenzies of action, double-handed gunplay, religious iconography, doves in flight, neon colours, sweat-drenched faces, the full buffet.
Those are the easily parodied elements. Less easy to copy is Woo’s wild use of editing, and his lens choices and angles, particularly in the assassination scenes when he’ll switch viewpoint again and and again and again, juxtaposing this manic switchback of activity with the ice cool of Chow Yun-Fat.
Though it starts out out looking like a re-run of Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession – where Rock Hudson becomes the secret benefactor hoping to restore the eyesight of Jane Wyman – the plot eventually recedes to insignificance and for whole stretches poor Jennie does not figure at all, though she’s periodically wheeled back for more whimpering and impotent scrabbling about. Sally Yeh has since said that this was not her finest hour as an actor, but in truth there is nothing in the writing for her to get stuck into.
Woo is in any case more interested in another relationship. The one between the hitman and the cop on his case. A maverick not unlike Dirty Harry, Inspector Lee Ying (Danny Lee) will become fascinated with the man he is chasing. Once the two men meet the inspector will discover that the fascination is mutual. A classic screen bromance develops. And then develops again into something fringed with the homo-erotic. At one point the two men even give each other pet names, and use them again in the guns-blazing us-against-the-world finale which takes up most of the film’s last 15 minutes.
It’s all good but in this last gunfight we can most obviously see the influence of Sam Peckinpah and Sergio Leone, while Ah Jong and Lee Ying increasingly take on the personas of Butch and Sundance, to add in a film from a different director entirely. In fact it’s possible to watch the whole film as Woo’s attempt to sneak a western beneath the radar of producer Tsui Hark, who was disenchanted with Woo at this point and in fact wanted to fire him (without financing by both Chow Yun-Fat and Danny Lee the film would not have been made).
Woo says the film is influenced by Melville and Scorsese. Melville is discernible, with Chow Yun-Fat a cool Alain Delon kind of character out of something like Le Samouraï, while the Scorsese of Mean Streets is evident in the tight male bonds and bantering interchanges.
This was the movie that got Woo his ticket to Hollywood in 1993, where Hard Target and Broken Arrow led to Face/Off, his most successful, because most Woo-like, Hollywood movie. But that was in 1997, which is a long time ago now. Fingers crossed for the remake of The Killer then. Maybe Woo, now in his late 70s, is about to have another moment in the sun.
The Killer – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2024
