John Woo remaking ‘The Killer’ is a truly sad state of affairs
Under most circumstances, a new John Woo movie is something to be celebrated and embraced, especially when he’s getting less and less prolific in the latter stages of a career that completely reinvented the face of action cinema several times over.
The pioneer of heroic bloodshed and the auteur who left their fingerprints over the genre for decades to come only made three features in the last decade, and none of them were designed to be seen by a particularly large audience. There have been odd flashes of the old brilliance, but it feels like a long time since Woo was firing on all cylinders.
2017’s Manhunt was heralded by Woo as a return to his roots, with the filmmaker specifically naming The Killer as an influence on an action thriller released exclusively on Netflix. His first Hollywood film in 20 years tanked at the box office when the ambitious wordless exercise Silent Night only notched $11million in ticket sales, and it didn’t even see the inside of a cinema in the United Kingdom.
Remakes are all the rage and have been for a long time, but it’s a lot rarer for a director to repurpose one from their own back catalogue, never mind one of the best. And yet, Woo has opted to reinvent The Killer for the modern age, and the results look far from spectacular.
The original is one of the greatest action flicks of all time, with Chow Yun-fat’s assassin wracked by guilt after accidentally blinding a nightclub singer during a shootout. Taking on one last lucrative job to help pay for an operation that can restore her sight, Danny Lee’s cop is initially dead-set on taking him down before the two form a mutual respect that reaches its crescendo during a showstopping church shootout.
If Woo wants to take another crack at The Killer then it’s hard to begrudge him, because he’s accomplished enough in his career to have earned the right to do whatever the hell he wants. And yet, the trailer doesn’t exactly instil a lot of confidence. It looks routine, formulaic, and safe, three words that should never be associated with such an important figure in action history.
Hollywood has been trying to remake it since the early 1990s, and Woo’s own involvement stretches back a decade. From the footage on offer so far, it begs the question as to why. He’s already made a version of The Killer that can’t be bettered, so why on earth would he spend so long trying to make another one that’s guaranteed to be a pale imitation of a film made by the same guy?
It looks like a knockoff of a Woo flick, which it technically is, even though it shouldn’t be. If there was a justifiable reason for doing The Killer again, then all potential sins could be forgiven. However, remaking it as an exclusive for the streaming service Peacock and casting Eric Cantona, of all people, as the villain doesn’t project a lot of confidence in its ability to outrun the shadow of its predecessor.
The Killer V2.0 never stood a chance of matching its originator, in fairness, but there are surely much better uses of Woo’s time and talent. Maybe it’ll blow everyone’s socks off come August 2024, even if it’s very unlikely.
