John Woo\u2019s \u201cThe Killer\u201d was a true gamechanger, at least for this critic. The one-two punch of Woo\u2019s 1989 action masterpiece with his equally magnificent \u201cHard Boiled\u201d changed the way I looked at the genre in my teens, and truly inspired hundreds of imitators. For anyone in my age range who can remember watching \u201cThe Killer\u201d (likely on VHS) decades ago, the thought of remaking a flawless film feels cinematically heretical. And yet Hollywood has been circling such a project for decades with Richard Gere and Nicolas Cage once attached in the \u201890s. After years of false starts, a remake finally emerges, limping onto Peacock with almost no fanfare or promotion. Directed by Woo himself, the 2024 version of \u201cThe Killer\u201d is obviously competently made\u2013the Hong Kong director still knows how to stage an action sequence, well into his seventies\u2014but the truth is that this version of the film does absolutely nothing better than the original. It\u2019s a movie that\u2019s generally watchable but almost instantly forgettable, which the best of Woo never is.<\/p>\n
Nathalie Emmanuel (Ramsey from the later \u201cFast and the Furious\u201d movies) plays the mysterious Zee, a stealthy assassin for a powerful organization run by the vicious Finn (Sam Worthington). The \u201cAvatar\u201d actor nails a certain kind of slimy power figure, the one who will pretend to have your best interests in mind but only as far as it suits him personally. When Zee gets a job that requires an assassination via samurai sword in a Parisian nightclub, the assignment goes sideways with the blinding of a singer named Jenn (Diana Silvers). Despite the fact that she can\u2019t exactly point the finger at the killer, Finn insists that Zee take out the witness, leading to moral crisis for the murderer for hire. While Zee tries to keep Jenn alive, a Paris cop named Sey (Omar Sy of \u201cLupin\u201d) gets this incredible case and crosses paths with Zee, giving \u201cThe Killer\u201d most of its narrative thrust in that it\u2019s a story of a criminal and a cop who may not be as different as they first believe. <\/p>\n
Clearly, a lot of the narrative beats of the original remain, although the gender swap naturally makes a pretty big difference both in the Zee\/Jenn relationship and the dynamic between Zee & Sey. The sort of dance between a killer and a cop, which many over the years even read as homoerotic in the original, has been shifted by the change but hardly anything has been done with that shift. Changing race, gender, and location should give \u201cThe Killer\u201d a different flavor, but the truth is that there\u2019s just no seasoning. It\u2019s as if the writers (Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell &\u00a0Martin Stuecken)\u00a0figured the swaps alone would be interesting enough that they didn\u2019t have to do anything more. It also just reeks of a script that has been in development for so long that all of the passion has been drained from it with rewrites, producer\u2019s notes, and focus groups. The original hums with energy in not just its ace filmmaking but its narrative structure, and there\u2019s just nothing to care about here in terms of plotting, while additions, like\u00a0a few flashbacks to Zee\u2019s origin story, feel half-hearted and cheap. <\/p>\n
Part of the problem here is that Emmanuel just isn\u2019t an interesting enough performer to sell the strong, silent cipher that Zee needs to be. I\u2019m not usually a critic who likes to judge the movie that isn\u2019t there but knowing that Lupita Nyong\u2019o was once attached to this before COVID shut down production reveals even more flaws in Emmanuel\u2019s work. Nyong\u2019o can do so much with body language and her amazing eyes that it feels \u201cThe Killer\u201d needed to work, and Emmanuel simply doesn\u2019t have the same skill set. Sy makes out much better, reminding viewers how charming he can be, but Silvers is a non-character, used almost entirely as a device.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
John Woo\u2019s \u201cThe Killer\u201d was a true gamechanger, at least for this critic. The one-two punch of Woo\u2019s 1989 action masterpiece with his equally magnificent \u201cHard Boiled\u201d changed the way I looked at the genre in my teens, and truly inspired hundreds of imitators. For anyone in my age range who can remember watching \u201cThe …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[24],"tags":[36,50,37],"class_list":["post-1510","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-action-movies","tag-action","tag-crime","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1510"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1510\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1510"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1510"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/us.celebrity2000.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1510"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}