Movie Review – Killer, The (2024)
Principal Cast : Nathalie Emmanuelle, Omar Sy, Sam Worthington, Diana Silvers, Said Taghmaoui, Angeles Woo, Eric Cantona, Tcheky Karyo, Gregory Montel, Hugo Diego Garcia, Michael Erpelding, Aurelia Agel.
Synopsis: An assassin tries to make amends in an effort to restore the sight of a beautiful young singer.
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Oh dear. Oh dear oh dear. Legendary action filmmaker John Woo, who seems to flit between his native Hong Kong and American cinema these days, is about the only filmmaker I’d trust to remake one of his own films, although the question of why he’d choose to go down this path is perhaps one of 2024’s most pertinent questions. Sitting comfortably alongside A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled as all-time action icon films, Woo’s seminal 1989 classic The Killer, starring Chow Yun Fat and Danny Lee, is to my mind the greatest film he’s ever made – arguments could easily be thrown about for any of the three aforementioned films, really, they’re all superb examples of genre filmmaking – and I guess the lure of Hollywood money to remake it for English-speaking audiences is strong, considering the status as a legendary piece of pop-culture art is so powerful. If you’d forced me at gunpoint to approve a remake with only a single condition it might be to ensure Woo himself took on the job; he does, and the end result is one of the most disappointing film experience of the year, if not the decade so far.
Like many my age, Woo’s original The Killer was the oft-whispered bootleg-VHS film you watched “over at a friend’s place”, because there’s no way in hell your parents would approve of you seeing a film marketed as having “the highest body count in film history”… A bold statement to be sure, but one that absolutely sold what it did on the tin. It was cool as hell, starred two hot young Chinese talents, and had action galore smothered with gritty violence and operatic themes of redemption, typical for Woo’s film output of the time. Remaking such a classic feels like a betrayal of sorts, and I’m conflicted at Woo’s involvement because by taking this project on and sullying his own legacy with a failure it only goes to prove that his critically successful American films – Hard Target, Broken Arrow and Face/Off – were possibly (Probably? Likely?) more good luck than definitive directorial achievement. Nothing the man has touched in English since, from Windtalkers, Paycheck and the indifferent Silent Night, have recaptured that mid-90’s Woo flavour; he was to action of the late 80’s and early 90’s that Michael Bay was to all that came along after. The 2024 version of The Killer sees Woo direct from a screenplay adaptation of his own original film by Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken (the former is best known for snagging an Academy Award for writing LA Confidential), and aside from Woo’s trope-ridden flourishes and surprisingly inert action sequences, there’s almost nothing of substantive entertainment value to be found here.
The Killer is a mess. It’s a disaster of a finished film, mired with stupefyingly bad dialogue, idiotic characterisation, clichés and generic story beats everywhere you look, and so many poor creative choices you start to wonder why this wasn’t one of many films of the last few years to be put quietly back onto the shelf and put down as a tax write-off. Woo’s mastery of action in a contemporary setting appears to have deserted him, with laughably clumsy action on display that lacks any real frisson – it’s certainly a low-point in a world in which John Wick exists, and although I hate myself for comparative reviews I can’t argue when the man I’m comparing John Woo’s efforts here to is fucking John Woo himself. This film is rage-inducing for just how poor a choice it was to remake this, the nostalgic baggage notwithstanding The Killer is still a terrible film in any language.
Transplanting the setting to Paris instead of some neon-soaked Hong Kong locale gives the film a Euro-centric flavour, but the awkward shoehorning British actress Nathalie Emmanuel (Game of Thrones, Army of Thieves) alongside an ill-fitting Omar Sy does nothing for this tableau. I guess in doing so Woo was trying to ape Luc Besson’s The Professional a little? Hard to say, because Emmanuel ain’t no Chow Yun Fat and she sure as shit ain’t well serviced with this asinine screenplay, and a cobbling of idiotic caricature gangsters as essayed by Avatar’s Sam Worthington and former professional footballer-turned actor Eric Cantona does nobody any good either. It isn’t helped by Worthington’s cringeworthy northern Irish accent slips in and out at points, while the manner in which Sy’s straight-arrow French cop is inserted into the story feels like what you get when you type something into Google translate and then translate it back into English again, only without an internet connection. I like Sy as an actor but in this film, he’s practically unwatchable, such is the disservice given to him by Woo’s propulsive camerawork. Diana Silvers takes over the Sally Yeh character from the original film, playing Jenn, who is temporarily blinded after a nightclub shootout, and rescued through a sudden burst of morality by Emmanuel’s titular killer character, Zee, while Said Taghamaoui (Wonder Woman, John Wick: Chapter 3) has little to do as a Saudi Prince for some reason. In a fit of ego, Woo even casts his daughter Angeles Woo in a minor supporting assassin role, playing one of Worthington’s henchladies late in the story.
As I mentioned, a lot of the character interplay and narrative crossovers make little sense and even less connection to the audience, and Woo isn’t able to command the freewheeling sense of action like he has on occasions past. There’s explosions, gravity defying fight sequences, plenty of chases and a lot of shootouts, and as you might expect shot with plenty of slo-motion and frantic cross-narrative beats – it should be noted that Woo somehow makes slo-motion cool again, having had it ruined by Zack Snyder’s overuse of the conceit in almost all his films since 300 – but there’s really no point to it all. The audience can’t invest in the plight of the central character, will never care about why Zee turns to fighting the good fight and taking a moral stand, or why she feels compelled to “save” Jenn from her own bullet after being ordered to “finish the job”. There’s no real depth to it all, and before anybody says that Woo’s original film was largely style over substance as well I would remind you that both Chow Yun Fat and Danny Lee had more charisma and could tell a characters backstory without saying a damn thing, in three minutes of the ’89 original than anything Woo accomplishes in this two-hour horror show. Poor Nathalie Emmanuel just isn’t up to the task of conveying a real sense of suave style or coolness, that undefinable joie de vivre that accompanied all of Woo’s Hong Kong films, and as much as the script puts her into a different haute couture outfit every four or five minutes it feels contrived, as if the production is simply going through the motions.
Of course, all of Woo’s patented directorial flourishes are evident: slow motion doves, a focus on Catholicism and religious iconography – in keeping with The Killer’s aesthetic, Woo starts this remake inside a church, which is where the original film came to its bloody conclusion – a lot of “two characters pointing guns at each other” Mexican standoff style, and a gratuitous amount of random innocent bystander carnage that in any other era of filmmaking would have Paris locked down tighter than a fish’s asshole. Perhaps most tellingly avoiding just how awful this film is, composer Marco Beltrami’s score for this flaming turd tries desperately to infuse some semblance of emotional connection into proceedings but ends up being a jarring, monotonously boring echo of Lowell Lo’s original sizzle-style work, without any memorable themes or a consistency to subtext. Type in “generic thriller music” and Beltrami’s music here might be the top result. At least the film looks a million bucks, although a lot of that style is abetted by the streets of Paris herself, the city remaining an iconic beauty that has seen many an atrocious film made within its labyrinth of laneways and iconic buildings. Mauro Fiore, a modern titan of cinematography (Training Day, The Kingdom, Avatar) gives the film a warm, lush look that accentuates Emmanuel’s short-statured beauty and subtle hues of Parisian backdrops, but this is about the only real positive in a film filled with creative mistakes.
Am I being too harsh on John Woo or the decision to greenlight this absolute bastardisation of the director’s acclaimed classic actioner? No, not at all. I have no compunction in stating that this is one of the worst films of 2024 made with a decent budget, for any reason, and on purpose. For what it promised, the end result is a wet fart, a bulbous wart of nebulous indifference to the viewer masquerading under the name of Woo’s own classic, and I’m not sure the world is prepared to admit that the man just hasn’t made a really good English language film in decades. If you really want to see Woo at his best in full flight, go watch Red Cliff or one of his classic Hong Kong action films, to see just how energetic and propulsive the man can be. The 2024 version of The Killer is an absolutely awful film experience, and should be avoided at all costs.
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