John Woo’s ‘The Killer’ Remake Is a Shockingly Enjoyable Time

John Woo’s remake of his personal 1989 Hong Kong motion basic The Killer features a working subplot involving an incomplete crossword puzzle. The title character totes one round, sometimes attempting to unravel its final remaining clues. And the large reply she lastly figures out after a lot deliberation is “reborn.”

The phrase holds apparent which means for an murderer who rediscovers some semblance of her humanity after she begins to guard a girl she by chance blinded. But it could additionally imply one thing to Woo, one of many best motion administrators within the historical past of cinema who’s spent plenty of the final 20 years not making motion movies — or a minimum of not the kind of flamboyant, operatic, emotionally and morally fraught motion movies that have been his trademark within the Eighties and ’90s.

Yes, The Killer may very well be seen as a step backward for a man like Woo, who’s undeniably retreading some very acquainted territory right here. But it’s additionally a step that Woo takes with grace and apparent pleasure, yielding a movie that delivers the identical kind of muscular pleasures that John Woo’s title used to ensure. It’s as if remaking a John Woo movie lastly gave John Woo permission to make a real John Woo movie once more.

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The broad strokes of 1989’s The Killer are all intact, however lots of the specifics are completely different within the 2024 model. For one factor, the movie is about in Paris, quite than Hong Kong, and focuses on a feminine murderer, performed by Nathalie Emmanuel as an alternative of Chow Yun-fat. Her Zee is a basic Woo hero: Deadly, ruthless, however honor-bound to comply with a strict ethical code. Before she accepts an task from Sam Worthington’s Finn, she at all times asks “Do they deserve this loss of life?” (“I wouldn’t ask you in the event that they didn’t,” is his typical response.)

Finn orders Zee to take out a complete nightclub of crooks, which she does in excessive model. (She finds an particularly spectacular approach of smuggling a weapon into the place undetected.) But a lounge singer named Jenn (Dianna Silvers) will get caught within the crossfire and loses her imaginative and prescient after a head harm. Zee’s contract stipulates Jenn should die, however Zee can’t deliver herself to do it. And when she visits Jenn within the hospital to complete the job, she will get interrupted by Sey (Omar Sy), the Paris cop scorching on Zee’s path, who doesn’t notice the killer he’s looking is standing proper in entrance of him.

If you’ve got even a passing familiarity with Woo’s Hong Kong movies, you understand that Zee and Sey are destined to meet many times, and that the 2 will come to see themselves as warped mirror pictures of the opposite. In one scene, the brand new Killer’s script (which is credited to Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, and Matt Stuecken, primarily based on Woo’s authentic 1989 screenplay) has the characters actually spell out their bond. “You can be me, and I’d be you,” they observe once they notice how in a different way their lives might have turned out with just some twists of destiny.

In different phrases: The Killer ain’t precisely delicate. Then once more, Woo’s movies have been by no means recognized or appreciated for his or her subtlety. Fans love his elaborate combat scenes, with their jarring physicality and stylized actions and digicam angles. In that regard, The Killer remake is Woo’s most interesting movie in a few years. The motion begins early with Sey chasing a automotive thief, in a set piece stuffed with ingenious pictures and actually brutal-looking stunt work. (Watch for that automotive and the motorcyclist!) Every couple of minutes, Woo ramps the depth again up with extra shootouts and squibs and slow-motion dives.

While Woo himself was definitely a significant motive why the unique Killer grew to become a basic, its forged — particularly the smoldering Chow Yun-fat — was one other enormous issue within the movie’s success. Emmanuel by no means fairly measures as much as Chow on this position, however she’s a stable anti-hero who acquits herself effectively in her many onscreen chases and battles. The standout is Sy, who does really feel like a contemporary inheritor to Chow’s gruff but good-looking, take-no-prisoners model of main man. The remainder of the forged, from Worthington to Said Taghmaoui as a corrupt Middle Eastern prince, understood the task, and nail the tone Woo needs (over-the-top melodrama tinged with wry humor) exactly.

Nothing about that is new, however Hollywood makes so few genuinely gritty thrillers lately that it feels novel anyway. The world didn’t want a remake of The Killer, and it’s potential that if this movie was directed by anybody apart from John Woo, it might really feel like a desecration of a masterpiece. In Woo’s fingers, the fabric works another time. I don’t essentially have to see another person’s copy of the Mona Lisa, however for those who informed me they found one other Mona Lisa that da Vinci painted 30 years after the primary one, I’d most likely need to check out that one too.

RATING: 7/10