Plot: Zee is a mysterious and infamous assassin known, and feared, in the Parisian underworld as the Queen of the Dead. But when, during an assignment from her shadowy mentor and handler, Zee refuses to kill a blinded young woman in a Paris nightclub, the decision will disintegrate Zee’s alliances, attract the attention of a savvy police investigator, and plunge her into a sinister criminal conspiracy that will set her on a collision course with her own past.
Review: Before coming to Hollywood and delivering modern action movies Broken Arrow, Hard Target, Face/Off, and Mission: Impossible II, John Woo revolutionized action cinema with the one-two punch of The Killer and Hard Boiled. Both films starred Chow Yun-fat and changed the landscape of action movies forever. In the years since their release, John Woo’s signature style has been copied ad nauseam, resulting in the appearance of slow motion, doves, and any balletic action sequences as cliche. Woo returned to English-language film with last year’s Silent Night. This innovative and relatively dialogue-free film gave me hope that his long-in-development remake of The Killer would be equally as refreshing. While it is nice to see Woo’s brand of beautiful bloodshed back on screen, the new take on The Killer is rote and redundant without offering a single moment that makes it worthwhile.
There is little that the 2024 version of The Killer shares in common with the 1989 original outside of the barest plot structure. Both films follow an assassin protecting a blind singer while being pursued by a police officer. In the original, the reluctant friendship between the killer and the cop creates a unique bromance twist. At the same time, the melodramatic plot existed to deepen the character development when Woo was not filming expertly choreographed gunfights and car chases. In the new film, the cat-and-mouse dynamic still exists between the killer and the cop, as does the blind singer, but beyond that, the story is vastly different. Now, the killer has a different reason for defending the blind singer, and the friendship that develops with the cop pursuer borders on romance. The character development now feels forced into the story and bogs down the action rather than augmenting it. There is significantly less action in this new The Killer than the trailers would lead you to believe.
Nathalie Emmanuel takes on the title role as Zee, the best assassin in France, who works for her handler, Finn (Sam Worthington). Zee has a rule that her targets deserve to die, and she will not kill civilians. When hired to clear a room of criminals, Zee dispatches them with a samurai sword and inadvertently blinds young American singer Jenn (Diana Silvers) but leaves her alive. When Finn sends Zee back to finish the job, Zee runs into Detective Sey (Omar Sy), who is pursuing a related theft of heroin that connects to a high-ranking French crimelord as well as a Saudi Prince (Said Taghmaoui). Sey is a righteous cop who does not always play safe, hates politics and has crossed paths with Zee before. Zee and Sey have mutual respect despite being on different sides of the law, and eventually, they find themselves working together to stop the true bad guys. Sy and Emmanuel have good chemistry on screen without turning it into a sexual relationship, but neither actor can overcome the soporific dialogue that bogs down the entire screenplay.
Clocking in at over two hours, I was hoping that The Killer would be jam-packed with action sequences along the lines of Woo’s previous efforts, but most of the movie is focused on characters talking rather than fighting. The Killer takes over ninety minutes to develop any momentum in the action. The 1989 film built up the characters over six months, whereas the new film shifts everything to take place in a matter of days. This diminishes the development of the characters’ shifting allegiances and feels forced and overly familiar. There is also the addition of new assassins to stand in Zee’s way, one of whom is played by John Woo’s daughter, Angeles. But, their introduction early in the film completely botches what is meant to serve as a twist in the plot. By the time the action kicks into gear, it is too late, and the movie has already beaten the familiar plot to death without adding anything new to make the viewer care about this new interpretation.
When John Woo wrote and directed The Killer in 1989, he was in his early forties. At 77, Woo still packs a punch when lensing action sequences but relies on the script work from Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, and Matt Stuecken, which fails in every conceivable way. Helgeland, best known for his whipsmart films L.A. Confidential and Payback, offers nothing more than stilted and wooden dialogue that not even the charming Omar Sy and Nathalie Emmanuel can rescue. The exposition is heavy-handed and bland, as is the entire look of the film. Suppose you can get past Mauro Fiore’s vanilla cinematography or the generic score by Marco Beltrami. In that case, you may appreciate the classic style of Woo’s action sequences, but they cannot help but feel cheap and low-budget. Once the movie hits the final act, Woo manages to evoke what has made him a film legend, but it is too late to salvage this forgettable remake.
The Killer was a masterpiece ahead of its time, while the 2024 version is well past its time. Despite Nathalie Emmanuel being perfectly cast in the lead and Omar Sy doing a great job, The Killer cannot help but be an uninteresting and overlong waste of time and talent. As evidenced by Silent Night, John Woo still has something in the tank, but The Killer is a total misfire in every sense. While seeing how a filmmaker can realize a concept in two completely different ways is interesting, The Killer may be the most unnecessary remake since Gus Van Sant’s Psycho. The Killer is the worst thing an action movie can be: boring. Avoid this movie at all costs unless you are a John Woo completist, and even then, you will be disappointed that you waited over thirty years for this.