John Woo's Remake of The Killer Is Dead on Arrival

When one of the greatest action movies of all time is remade into a mediocre TV movie, is it more or less painful if the same man is in the director's chair for both?

This is the dilemma viewers face with The Killer, the legendary John Woo's remake of his own 1989 classic. Starring Chow Yun-fat as a remorseful assassin, the original is perhaps the pinnacle of Woo's signature style of showy visuals, excessive action, and masculine melodrama, inspired by French and Japanese gangster movies and known as "heroic bloodshed," or "bullet ballet," among other names. It, along with his other Hong Kong films such as A Better Tomorrow and Hard Boiled, helped put the southeast Asian city-state on the map as a destination for global cinema outside of martial arts movies and propel the director to Hollywood, where he would make Face/Off and Mission: Impossible II. He then took a long break from Hollywood to make a series of historical epics, including the wuxia Red Cliff and the Titanic-esque The Crossing, before returning last year with the curious dialogue-free actioner Silent Night.

It is absurd to expect a director to do the same thing twice, even if they're remaking their own movie. The Killer 2024, then, makes a lot of changes, and on paper, they don't look so terrible. We have a change of setting, from Hong Kong to Paris. We have a story that is broadly the same, with new players and different details: The titular killer, now played by Nathalie Emmanuel, accidentally blinds a young female singer during a hit job and teams up with a righteous yet disgraced cop, now played by Omar Sy, to save her and leave the criminal underworld behind in the process.

So there's a lot of potential in that formulation, and in the opening scenes, it feels like Woo might have some of the old magic back. The director tries to take advantage of being in Paris, the city of his idol, Jean-Pierre Melville. He swaps the fake church from the first movie for a real one, reveling in the grandeur of its light and cavernous heights and letting his signature doves fly. He restrains his usually over-the-top style by several notches, in line with moody Melville classics like Le Samouraï.
Except, is that what he's really doing? I don't want to compare this movie too much to the original, against which anything would look worse in comparison. It's being made in a different country, in a different industry, in drastically less fruitful conditions for creativity. After all, this thing is going straight to a streaming service and not even one of the more prominent ones. (It was made for Peacock, NBCUniversal's platform.) Yet even in comparison to other modern action movies, The Killer feels disappointing. It's not poorly made by any stretch, but it is so blandly competent that I can't help feeling let down.

Everything about this movie is "just fine." None of the actors are particularly emotive, and not because of a desire to emulate Alain Delon-style coolness. Sam Worthington, who usually acts in a mocap suit in the Avatar movies and here playing a menacing mobster, might be the biggest offender between his wooden delivery and terrible Irish accent. There's also very little chemistry between anyone, even Zee, the assassin played by Emmanuel, and Inspector Sey, her counterpart played by Sy. These are supposed to be two warriors on opposite sides of the law bonded by the same code of honor, yet they act like little more than friends. The same can be said of Zee's relationship with Jenn, the singer played by Diana Silvers. There was a romantic charge in the relationship between the killer and the singer in the '80s film that this new version has done away with. Both relationships are developed through expository dialogue and unnecessary backstory, which takes away from the mythical, archetypal quality the original had — extraneous story details do not always equate to a better film.
The action and visuals are, again, not particularly great or spectacular. There are a few clever bits of visual storytelling here and there — Zee's pet goldfish, for instance, represents her feeling trapped in the life of a gun-for-hire, and after a twist in the story, its bowl eventually breaks, symbolizing the increased danger that comes with freedom. But I sometimes felt like I was watching Netflix's Lupin series, and not because of the shared Parisian setting and the presence of Sy, a major star in France, at the top of the bill. It was because the movie looks and feels like a bland TV drama, like an episode of NCIS given a budgetary bump for sweeps week. Even the script feels undercooked: Its pacing is slow, and while the story may be the same as the earlier film, the dialogue leaves a lot to be desired, full of clumsy metaphors (Zee compared to "a monk without a God" by her boss) and awful patter. When the cops catch Zee appearing repeatedly at the same Turkish takeaway place, Sey cracks, "She's a beautiful woman, why doesn't someone take her to dinner?" Gross. At one point, Zee shows Jenn her goldfish, named "Y" — "What happened to X?" Jenn jokes. Ugh.

Ultimately, Woo's new The Killer is not the comeback he might have hoped for, but is instead an excellent example of what Hollywood has to offer today: no ambition, no new ideas, and no depth of feeling. Interestingly, it premiered less than a year after another movie titled The Killer, which was also about an assassin and set (partially) in Paris and was released straight-to-streaming (Netflix). Yet that film, directed by David Fincher, was wildly more interesting and told an original story with a plot that pleasurably toyed with viewer expectations. I would recommend checking out Woo's original The Killer instead of this one. Sadly, rights issues around its ownership have prevented it from being legally viewable in good quality in this country for years. Seek it out if you can, and chuck your Peacock sub in the trash — you won't be needing it anymore.

The Killer. Starring Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy, and Sam Worthington. 126 minutes. Rated R. Available to stream on Peacock.