The Killer (Woo, 1989)IMDB LinkIt looks like a familiar story. Assassin with a conscience decides to quit after having a wake-up call and does One Last Job, which in hit man movies is just asking to be fucked by circumstances. And if this is familiar concept, I'm not really sure if "The Killer" started the trend or just a continuation of a popular premise. Probably the latter, but it does not really matter that much. John Woo does a fantastic job.
Firstly, his film is a beautiful, over the top Hong Kong action. The body count is INSANE. When the evil henchman sends his thugs to kill our hero assassin, they don't send one or two people after him, but dozens and dozens of them shooting with pistols, shot guns, rifles, machine guns and coming after him in bikes and cars, and they all killed instantly. It gets a bit long and repetitive at times, but Woo's strength in the film is everything else on TOP of the violence.
While I don't expect much from over the top action films, "The Killer" reaches classic status because of several other factors. Such as…
Yun-Fat Chow! He's a fantastic actor, really bringing something great to the role. He has the ability to look both COOL and TROUBLED at the same time, sometimes you can see the pain he carries with him behind his confident, cocky grin.
Chow’s assassin character at the beginning of the movie accidently blinds a female singer during a shootout. Feeling guilty he tries to befriend her without her knowing who he is. But the movie’s real relationship isn’t the assassin’s love for the singer but his eventual friendship with the cop who is after him. Interestingly, reading about the attempts at the film’s Hollywood remake, one of the issues the would-be producers had with this film was that American audiences would misunderstand the friendship as homoerotic and in one remake rewrite, they changed the cop to a female character so the audience would GET it more. So heh.
4/5
