John Woo’s The Killer (2024) is not John Woo’s The Killer (1989)

Photo: Thibault Grabherr/Universal Pictures

Well, he finally did. John Woo finally released this American remake of The Killer The film has been in the works since the first installment came out in 1989. Woo’s debut, starring Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee, was one of the key films that introduced Western moviegoers to Hong Kong genre cinema. Today, it stands like an ancient cathedral, a monumental achievement that is impossible to imagine being made in 2024. It is a magnificent action melodrama overstuffed with passionate emotion and extravagant violence, exaggerated in every way imaginable. One of the slogans on its poster was “A vicious hitman. A ferocious cop. Ten thousand bullets.” Frankly, that seemed too conservative a calculation. To make the same film today would probably require reorganizing human civilization.

Which is another way of saying it would be crazy to hope that Woo, 77 (who recently returned to filmmaking after a long hiatus with last year’s film) Sweet nighta movie I liked but most others didn’t) to try to remake the same movie. Luckily, he didn’t. This new, half-reverse version of The Killerwhich is set in France and stars Nathalie Emmanuel as the expert assassin and Omar Sy as the policeman who obsessively pursues her, has much the same narrative structure as the original but a totally different vibe. It eschews flowery romanticism, thick atmosphere, and grand myth-making, opting instead for a light and silly modesty. It’s fun, ridiculous, and deliriously violent in its own right.

The Killer is streaming directly on Peacock, and — it feels like a betrayal to admit it — it may actually be the right place for it. Streamers have been trying to sell us bloated, difficult action clones with no imagination or invention for years. And while this new Killer While the film lacks the insane grandeur of the old one, Woo still knows how to be creative with his action scenes, even when he’s just playing off the hits. Some of the moves in the new film are borrowed from the previous film (including a few iconic ones), while others seem to have been made up on the spot. But this time around, the assassin in question, Zee (Emmanuel), is as adept with her hands and thighs as she is with pistols and rifles. When she takes down a nightclub full of thugs, she does so with a carbon fiber samurai sword hidden in pieces in her skintight black dress, which she pieces together while seductively twirling around the dance floor with a man she’s about to rip in half. There’s plenty of blood in The KillerBut Woo also slips in moments of his patented macabre poetry. One man’s death is accompanied not by geysers of blood but by an explosion of red flower petals, another’s by the crystalline glint of a champagne bottle.

It’s those shards of glass that end up accidentally blinding Jenn (Diana Silvers), a seemingly innocent singer who happens to be in the room when Zee performs one of her hits. We already know that Zee, despite her brutal profession, has a moral code: After every murder, she lights a candle for the deceased, and her ritual question upon receiving an assignment from her boss Finn (Sam Worthington, sporting a charmingly awkward Irish accent and clearly having a good time) is: “Does this man deserve to die?” When Finn asks Zee to meet Jenn at the hospital and finish the job, our heroine has a crisis of conscience. It’s also how she meets Sey (Omar Sy), who seems to immediately sense there’s more to this woman. Woo has taken a page or two from Luc Besson’s novel The Woman Nikita (1990) to flesh out Zee’s story. The great Tchéky Karyo, who played Anne Parillaud’s cold-blooded manager Bob in that film, even makes an appearance here.The Woman Nikita (had its own Hong Kong remake in 1991; the exchanges between Hong Kong action cinema and the French “cinema of the look” movement were quite pronounced at the time.)

“My specialty is knowing how to make my actors look beautiful,” Woo told me when I interviewed him a few years ago. “I know how to find the right angle to make them look beautiful.” That’s one of his great talents, really. It’s that instinct that led him to turn Chow Yun-fat into a Hong Kong cross between Alain Delon and Ken Takakura, with a touch of Clint Eastwood. He tries something different with Emanuel, emphasizing first her reserve, then her physique. (He doesn’t have to expend much extra energy to make her look beautiful.) He films Sy from low angles to maximize the 6-foot-3 actress’s height, but he also captures the slightly bemused expression on the performer’s face, as if Sey appreciates Zee’s ability to constantly distance herself from him. He’s quickly drawn to her as an equal; it doesn’t hurt that the other cops seem corrupt, either. The back-and-forth between this colossal cop and this sneaky, elusive criminal becomes an amusing game of cat and mouse. The Killerafter all, so we know that they will soon start working together to protect Jenn and, eventually, each other.

But back to the action. Any Woo film will live or die based on how well he orchestrated the massacre. This new Killer is filled with action scenes, and they never feel phoney or generic. As with the John Wick movies (although this movie is much dumber than the John Wick In Hong Kong films, there is a sense that each sequence has been designed to showcase different skills, objects, and settings. But it also feels intuitive, not programmed. In the “heroic massacre” era of Hong Kong cinema, Woo and his colleagues developed chaos as they shot. There was not always a set script; sometimes there was none at all. They imagined one move, one shot, one angle, and then another, always drawing on what had just happened for the next. This was the key to their art, and it is also why Woo was one of the few to successfully transition to Hollywood; he was given the power (at least in some productions) to work in his own way. It seems as if he had found a way to this sense of freedom. By the time the climactic scene arrives in The Killer (as in the original, it takes place in and around a church), one wonders what new, inventive and wacky ways of killing we’re going to see this time around. Woo doesn’t disappoint.