In 1989, The Killer was released in theaters around the world. The third pairing of John Woo and Chow Yun-fat would go on to set the Gold Standard of Hong Kong action flicks. Yun-fat and Woo had worked in the landmark 1986 A Better Tomorrow or True Colors of a Hero under its Chinese title. It helped propelled Yun-fat to a rising action hero and then an international star.
In 1987, Yun-fat and Danny Lee appeared in Ringo Lam’s crime flick City on Fire, which Quentin Tarantino swore up and down he hadn’t seen, even though the similarities with Reservoir Dogs are uncanny. In that movie, Yun-fat played an undercover cop and Lee was a criminal. In The Killer, Yun-fat is a hired assassin for the Triad and Lee plays a police detective fed up with the bureaucracy.
Woo wrote the script and was able to make Yun-fat’s Ah Jong and Lee’s Li Ying so similar even though they were on both sides of the law. During a hit job at the beginning of the movie, Ah Jong fires a revolver near the face of a lounge singer who goes blind from the blast. Ah Jong feels guilt and gets close to the woman singer now blind that they start a relationship. But when he asks for a lot of money for a final job killing a crime boss, he is double-crossed. Running from the Triad, he is also being followed by the police as Li Ying sympathizes with him as Ah Jong took a young girl to the hospital who was injured during a fire fight.
The movie was a landmark and Hollywood tried for most of the 1990s to remake it. However, some executives felt there was a homoerotic connection between Ah Jong and Li Ying. The remake found itself in development hell as Woo completed the trifecta with Yun-fat as a cop in Hard Boiled. Then, he went to Hollywood himself and made Hard Target, a loose adaptation of “The Most Dangerous Game” which is still probably one of the best movies Jean-Claude Van Damme has ever made.
After that was the mediocre action thriller Broken Arrow with John Travolta, Christian Slater and…Howie Long? The movie is basic except for a hilarious death scene for Travolta’s military officer turned evil role. It also became infamous for Roger Ebert convincing Gene Siskel it wasn’t that good during their show Siskel & Ebert and the critics ended up giving it “Two Thumbs Down.”
Woo would then rebound with Face/Off, a sci-fi action thriller with a plot so ludicrous it could’ve bombed if it took itself too seriously. Thanks to an over-the-top performance by Nicholas Cage and Travolta convincingly great as both a stoic, grieving FBI agent and as a master criminal relishing in the carte blanche he gets by being a high-ranking federal officer, it was a critical and commercial success. And then he was tapped by Tom Cruise to direct the first sequel to Mission: Impossible. But there were rumors that Cruise locked Woo out of the editing room and didn’t let him have final cut. The whole reason Hugh Jackman is Logan/Wolverine is because Cruise wouldn’t let Dougray Scott travel from Australia to Canada to begin filming on the first X-Men movie.
Unfortunately, Woo’s next two Hollywood movies, Windtalkers and Paycheck, weren’t the best. And Woo went back to Southeast Asia for many years, returning with the 2023 action movie Silent Night. The movie was about an electrician played by Joel Kinnaman in a Texas town getting revenge against the gang members that killed his son during the cross-fire of a drive-by. The character played by Kinnaman also gets shot in the throat but survives. And the movie had minimal spoken dialogue.
Silent Night received mixed reviews and only grossed about $11 million which might explain why the inevitable remake was released on Peacock in August. Woo returns as director for this updated version. (It should be noted at this time, this is not the 2023 The Killer directed by David Fincher and starring Michael Fassbender in the titular role.) The setting this time is Paris which is where part of the 2023 movie was set probably adding to some more confusion.
And I can already hear the people criticize this as being a woke DEI movie as the titular role is Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel) and the cop is Sey (Omar Sy), a black man. (Of course, most critics would overlook the fact that the 1989 original featured a cast of 100 percent people who were from Southeast Asia and was in Cantonese and wasn’t set at all in North America but the Hong Kong area.) The European setting gives the movie a little diversity. Sy is French and Emmanuel is British, even though her mother is from the Dominican Republic, which was were some of the 2023 Killer was set. Odd coincidence, indeed.
It’s basically the same set-up as Zee is contracted by Finn (Sam Worthington), an Irishman who works for the local crime boss to kill some drug dealers in town from Marseille trying to cut in on the local action. Zee kills them all but Jenn Clark (Diana Silvers), an American signer in the party room is injured when she falls hitting the back of her head causing her to go blind.
Shortly thereafter, Sey and his partner, Jax (Gregory Mantel), get into a shoot-out with a lowly drug-dealer “Coco” (Hugo Diego Garcia) who just also happens to be the boyfriend of Jenn. Following a chase in which Jax gets injured, Sey kills “Coco” after he takes a child as a hostage in a crowded area. And just like the Hong Kong original, the bureaucracy goes after Sey, but he makes a connection between “Coco” and Jenn.
Zee pretends to be a vice-counsel from the American embassy to get into Jenn’s hospital room intending to inject a poison into her IV. However, Jenn says she can’t recall much. And the attempt is also foiled when Sey shows up to also question Jenn. But from there, Sey detects Zee’s ruse and it leads to Sey realizing that the local drug crime boss, Jules Gobert (Eric Cantona), is involved in some more crimes.
It’s a complicated story. Woo kept it simple in the 1989. But in this day and age, you got to have more plot complications. And that’s the problem. I like that Jenn is a more three-dimensional character this time. Sally Yeh as Jennie in the original seemed to act like an archaic version of women. And I admit, she was kind of annoying at times. You don’t have to be Hercule Poirot or C. Augustine Dupin to determine that there’s no odd coincidence Jenn was hanging around the drug dealers from Marseille.
Because the remake has been in development hell since before Emmanuel was in pre-school, the shooting script was probably a big casserole dish of ideas that have been spinning around for decades. Brian Hegleland, a much in-demand writer, along with Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken (who wrote 10 Cloverfield Lane) are credited as writers. But I’m sure the script has ingredients here and there that were added back when Walter Hill and David Giler had turned in a script in 1992 with the intentions of Richard Gere and Denzel Washington starring.
Woo still manages to style and film a great action movie that is worth watching. And Emmanuel does a great job that goes above the hired killer who grows a heart trope. However, Woo set up the original as a type of Greek tragedy as Ah Jong was a flawed man who was trying to do something more noble in the end, but he still fails. It might have flown in Hong Kong and other countries in 1989. But if you’re going to have Americans spend two hours with these characters, they want a more happy ending.
Regardless, it does all work together, especially when you realize Worthington is not just in the movie in what seems like a minimum role because his career has hit the skids after the success of Avatar died down. Woo seems to be allowed to do what he’s most famous for, even though the movie is released through Universal Pictures. But since it’s only on Peacock, that’s why.
Woo’s style has influenced a whole bunch of filmmakers including Tarantino, Richard Rodriguez and The Wachowskis. And with all the people familiar with those works, it’s harder to still impress younger audiences. I had arguments with so many people how Mission: Impossible 2 wasn’t a rip-off of The Matrix.
It’s a shame it didn’t get a theatrical release. And Peacock isn’t nearly the whipping boy of streaming as Paramount-Plus is, which will hopefully lead to more people seeing it. If anything else, it will hopefully lead to them tracking down Woo’s earlier works. The thumbs-up that Yun-fat gave in A Better Tomorrow 2 has already become a popular meme. People might ought to see where the movie it’s from.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 