Well, he finally did it. John Woo finally released that American remake of The Killer that’s been in the works almost since the first one premiered back in 1989. Woo’s original, starring Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee, was one of the key films that introduced Hong Kong genre cinema to western cinephiles.
Today, it stands like an ancient cathedral, a monumental achievement that’s impossible to imagine being made in the year 2024. It’s a magnificent action melodrama overloaded with heated emotions and extravagant violence, over the top in every conceivable way. One of its poster taglines was “One Vicious Hitman.
One Fierce Cop. Ten Thousand Bullets.” Frankly, that math seemed too conservative.
To make the same movie today, you’d probably have to reengineer human civilization. Which is all another way of saying that it would be crazy to expect the 77-year-old Woo (who recently returned to filmmaking after a long period away with last year’s Silent Night , a film I liked but most others didn’t) to try and make the same movie again. Luckily, he hasn’t.
This new, half-gender-flipped version of The Killer , set in France and starring Nathalie Emmanuel as the expert assassin and Omar Sy as the cop obsessively pursuing her, has roughly the same plot outline as the original but a totally different mood. It skips the florid romanticism, the thick atmosphere, the grand mythmaking, opting instead for a breezy, silly modesty. It’s fun, ridiculous, and deliriously violent .