John Woo never feels fully in control of The Killer, the remake of his own film from 1989, an accusation you could never have levelled at the original.
Flipping the gender of the assassin, and switching from Hong Kong to Paris both seem like sound ideas, not least because in some quarters the increasingly tight relationship between the assassin and his cop pursuer in the original seemed a bit too close to homosexual. No chance of that now. Omar Sy is in the cop role, and of all the many actors in this strangely off thriller, Sy probably comes out of it least shortchanged.
There are two familiar tales here. First the “a hitman gets a conscience” plot – Nathalie Emmanuel’s Zee cannot knock off a blameless blind singer at a nightclub where she has killed an entire gang with samurai sword and gun. Second, the “hitman and cop find they’re strangely alike” plot – as Zee and Sy’s confusingly named cop Sey chase the bad guys they increasingly find they are on the same path, and wavelength.
Sam Worthington plays Zee’s flaky control, Finn, a man with a strange Northern Ireland accent and Oirishry to spare. Tchéky Karyo a tailor Zee has befriended (no idea what this plotline is about). Éric Cantona is art-loving gangster Gobert (and the ex-footballer is very good too). Saïd Taghmaoui a Gulf Prince whose plane full of heroin has been heisted, possibly by bent cops, or the gang Zee has annihilated, or Gobert, or Finn, or all of them in some strange kind of co-operative action.
It gets confusing, and increasingly immaterial. What we want from a John Woo film, after all, is style and action. He gives us both, but not enough.
There was plenty of buzz before this movie came out but the result cannot justify it. The scapegoating got going instantly, with Nathalie Emmanuel’s performance in particular getting pilloried on social media and in opportunistic film magazines who detected blood in the water – you build ’em up (Game of Thrones), then you knock ’em down. But in fact Emmanuel is good enough to get over the bar in terms of acting and charisma, looks good or even great in the stylish clothes she’s kitted out in and passes muster (I’d say just about) in the fight scenes.
But she’s not a magician and can do little with too many scenes of pointless exposition with one superfluous character after another. It’s an exercise in running up a down escalator. The 1989 original was a touch too long. This is 15 minutes longer and every one of those minutes is unnecessary.
Given that Google Translate exists, I don’t know why Woo and his producers didn’t just run his original screenplay through it, add French colour and a female hitman, give it a trim here and there and then put the whole thing out there. Instead, a case of too many cooks, too many drafts, I’d suggest.
Whining to one side, the Sy/Emmanuel relationship works, and as in the original there’s a frisson suggesting a “to be continued” aspect some time in the future. And the movie does eventually start to cook once it moves into its final third and John Woo can start getting his stylistics onto the screen.
This is, of course, the film’s other big problem. When Woo made A Better Tomorrow, The Killer and Hard Boiled 30-plus years ago, he gave the action-thriller an infusion of new blood. But every jobbing action director has long since absorbed his trademarks – long flowing coats, slo-mo leaps with a gun blazing in each hand, religious settings, opera swelling on the soundtrack.
It might explain why Woo doesn’t give us more of it – he knows it’s been done to death. But no one does it quite as well, and there’s a point near the end, at a showdown in a church, when a black-clad Emmanuel vaults in ninja slo-mo over a row of church pews with arms at 180 degrees to each other, a gun at the end of each and, in spite of the swamp I’d had to wade through to get this far, a little “Yes!” erupted from my throat. A bit more of that, please.
The Killer – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
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© Steve Morrissey 2025
