'The Killer' (2024) Review: John Woo's Poetic Tale of Resurrection
While the contemporary remake of The Killer may not reach the heights of the 1989 original, John Woo’s penchant for visual poetry through action remains unmatched, as he reinterprets his cruel story for a more hopeful, miraculous one.
It would be easy to compare John Woo’s 2024 remake of The Killer, with his 1989 original, say it’s an inferior film and be done with it. However, one would be entirely missing the larger picture of Woo reinterpreting his darkest, most cruel tale for American audiences. The movie not only tells an entirely different story (by keeping the bare bones of the plot similar) but acts as a literal and figurative tale of Woo’s resurrection within Hollywood after a return to China in the wake of Paycheck’s critical and commercial failure.
Late last year, Woo returned to Hollywood with his Silent Night, which acted as a reminder of his image-making prowess, one wholly reliant on symbols and the face of its lead star saying more than words. It might not have been perfect, but it was a real lesson in visual poetry from one of our most treasured artists who not only revolutionized the action landscape but also how the audience should view cinema as a visual medium more than anything else.
It’s of no surprise, then, that The Killer contains some of Woo’s most striking images, including a reflective shot of a mirror that overlaps both Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel) and Sey’s (Omar Sy) faces. This particular image threw me out of a loop, attempting to figure out exactly how Woo and cinematographer Mauro Fiore pulled this miraculous frame off. But it’s also indicative of how different the story will take shape. By swapping the gender of the titular killer, the homoerotic tension between Jeff (Chow Yun-fat) and Li (Danny Lee) is completely gone.
Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy and John Woo behind the scenes of 'The Killer'
Instead, Woo offers an age-old tale of redemption between the two characters, one in which Zee longs for forgiveness after accidentally rendering singer Jenn (Diana Silvers) blind during a nightclub assassination. Zee’s boss, Finn (Sam Worthington), tells her that there should be no loose ends and Jenn must die, but the assassin is slowly having a change of heart. It’s why he’s sending other assassins after her to not only finish the job but kill Zee after she threatens to expose his operation.
Meanwhile, police detective Sey longs for more transparency within his department as he investigates the theft of Prince Majeb Bin Faheem’s (Saïd Taghmaoui) plane, which contained large amounts of heroin. The drug pins back to untouchable crime lord Jules Gobert (Eric Cantona), but corrupt police officers are looking the other way. But as he digs deeper into the case, he realizes that Jenn may be his only hope of putting down Gobert once and for all, giving way to an unlikely alliance between an assassin and a detective.
Within the first two minutes of The Killer, Woo primes the audience with a spiritually charged shot of a dove flying behind a cross inside a deconsecrated church, a symbol of purity and hope, before Zee ever begins to experience it firsthand. Of course, those with eagle eyes (pun intended) will remark that birds were noticeably absent in Woo’s Silent Night, and he adopted a far different style of capturing action and emotion than he does in his remake of The Killer.
As if the symbolism wasn’t obvious, Zee goes to the Church after each assignment to light a candle in the hopes that a higher power will forgive her for what she did. But with the location being deconsecrated, the hopes of it reaching out are sparse. Still, Zee begins to believe in miracles after Jenn forgives her for blinding her, blaming herself instead for being involved in something she shouldn’t have been. Their connection doesn’t go as deep as Jeff and Jennie (Sally Yeh) in the 1989 original. Still, there is hope that perhaps her condition will be reversed, unlike Woo sending her to the figurative depths of Hell after Jeff gets crucified for what he has done, losing his vision and his life before Jennie goes completely blind.
While Woo punishes all of his protagonists in the 1989 original’s Sam Peckinpah-esque final act, the filmmaker doesn’t have the same perception of Zee that he did with Jeff in the 1989 movie. Woo and screenwriters Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, and Matt Stuecken's perception of the protagonist is entirely different than Jeff, a purely evil individual with no signs of redemption in his bones, who took vision away from a pure singer who didn’t deserve it. But Zee was not born out of hatred or corruption. She, unfortunately, made too many bad choices that led her to where she is now, as Finn’s ‘cushla machree,’ doing everything he dares not do.
That’s why she’s primed for a rebirth, willing to start anew, even if she’s been on a path that isn’t spiritually averse. In representing this torment, Emmanuel imbues Zee with sensitivity and anguish unlike any protagonist Woo had previously treated on screen. In the 1989 film, Jeff feels remorse for his actions towards Jennie, leading him away from his organization, but never enough to warrant the redemption he seeks. For Zee, it’s been too long that she wants to start fresh, but the trap she’s set in will never allow her to…unless she frees herself and begins to believe in miracles.
I remain amazed by how Woo visually represents this shift, from carefully calibrated camera moves to the balletic, almost musical quality he gives to each action scene. The first time we see Zee in action, slashing gangsters with a samurai sword, Woo doesn’t shy away from her brutal force, but something clicks after Jenn goes blind. The action then gets more sweeping and heroic as Zee becomes less interested in killing to satisfy Finn and instead wishes to tie up all loose ends to start again. The use of slow-motion, in particular, allows Woo to embellish Zee’s quest, and each pause in how she wields a weapon, or, in this case, shoots it, gives meaning to her desire to live again.
The gun-fu is less expressive and grandiloquent here than in the 1989 original, but that also indicates how Woo’s perception of action choreography has changed. His style fits in more with modern sensibilities but can still visually represent his old bag of tricks with a contemporary look and feel. The camera swiftly pans to exacerbate a tense exchange between Gobert and Finn, as a glass of martini approaches them, or a sniper battle between Zee and Chi Mai (played by Angeles Woo, one of John’s children) employs zooms effectively to misdirect the audience. There’s never a dull moment in how Woo always pushes the boundaries of what’s possible in action, even with the streaming limitations he has to work with. The hospital shootout is an excellent example of this: the action constantly feels alive and grandiose through slow-motion, fuses blowing up as guns hit their targets, and Marco Beltrami’s Ennio Morricone-inspired score, giving the remake the Western quality Woo always enjoys tipping the hat to.
It almost feels like a miracle every time Woo crafts an action scene, and his sense of poetry has further refined itself into more elaborate symbols and motifs. Of course, there are pigeons and doves galore. Still, he even repurposes them with spiritual power designed to make you leap out of your seat, as we see two doves coming out of both sides of a cross, while a villain is laying down on the ground, crucified precisely the way Christ would be. In this case, the doves represent the hope that Zee and Jenn will attain should they get out of this. A miracle comes their way as the stained glass reflects on Jenn’s eye, and something so unbelievable occurs it may very well be the most poetic moment of any film released this year.
It feels miraculous that Woo is still finding new and exciting ways to shoot and choreograph action at 77 years old, always one step ahead of the filmmakers who his work has inspired. The final shootout at a church graveyard is the film’s biggest morceau de bravoure, blending catharsis (bodyguards being blown up on their motorcycles as they jump from one grave to the next) and visual poetry (doves, the church’s stained glass, crucifixes) to reinterpret the tragic ending of Woo’s 1989 film into a truly fantasmagorical tale of redemption.
Simply put, The Killer is all about miracles. With each gesture the protagonist makes, she begins to experience the miracle of belief in a higher power, bringing her closer to God. We then experience the miracle of resurrection, after Jenn has a face-to-face encounter with the Heavenly Father, gazing her eye on top of a stained glass. And the miracle of action filmmaking as the purest form of emotion. Nothing pleases the eyes and ears more than the perfect marriage of visual symbolism and maximalist in-your-face action. John Woo has made his mark for more than fifty years in China and Hollywood and will continue to do so for as long as he is able to. Here’s hoping his next film comes out much sooner than later.