For the last 30 years, various creative forces in Hollywood have tried to produce an American remake of John Woo’s 1989 Hong Kong crime thriller “The Killer.” After languishing in development hell for all that time, the result has made its way onto Universal’s Peacock streaming service, with Woo himself in the director’s chair. But the finished product is such a strange curiosity.
The original film starred frequent Woo collaborator Chow Yun-Fat as Ah Jong, a career contract killer with a heart of gold, who falls for singer Jennie (Sally Yeh) after accidentally blinding her in a firefight. This tragic blunder occurred during his planned final hit before retirement, so he ends up having to take one more job to pay for the surgery she needs to save her sight, bringing him into conflict (and, eventually, camaraderie) with Detective Ying (Danny Lee), a cop whose life he once saved.
It was a shock for some when it was reported in 2019 that Woo had chosen Lupita Nyong’o for the lead role of his remake, gender- and race-bending the original protagonist. But Woo’s work has been ingrained in Black popular culture since Raekwon and Method Man first argued over a missing VHS copy of “The Killer” on “Wu-Tang: 7th Chamber.” And Nyong’o is one of the few performers among her peers who possesses the range and screen presence to make such a role her own rather than being swallowed up by Chow’s long shadow.
But scheduling conflicts caused Nyong’o to pull out of the production, leaving “Game of Thrones” veteran and charisma vacuum Nathalie Emmanuel to play Zee, the remake’s central hit woman. It would be unfair to call Emmanuel talentless, tactless to call her “just a pretty face,” and perhaps unkind to say she regularly delivers performances that carry the kind of emotional weightlessness usually reserved for AI-generated condolences. But suffice it to say she is no Lupita Nyong’o. The screenplay could give her more to work with in the first place, too. Where Ah Jong was charming and carried himself with an effortless brand of coolness that made him captivating even when he wasn’t speaking or dual-wielding .45s, Zee is indistinguishable from any other number of generic female protagonists of low-budget action pictures. Ah Jong was a killer whose surprising goodness was an intriguing contradiction, but in Zee, that nuance is replaced with quirks around crossword puzzles and owning a pet goldfish. Zee isn’t a force of malevolence tempered by an inherent sense of morality, but a woman who only takes assignments wherein the target is “a bad guy.”
The general plot is essentially the same, but there is zero romance between her and the blinded singer this time (played by Diana Silvers), something one might have expected given the change of the lead’s gender and the producer’s initial concern over translating the relationship between Ah Jong and Detective Ying. (Some worried the criminal and the cop admiring one another would be interpreted as homosexuality, despite literally every American movie about a cop chasing a killer already being stuffed to the brim with homoerotic subtext.) Speaking of “the cop,” Omar Sy plays Sey here, a French inspector Zee saved once years ago on a job. But there’s minimal interplay between the two.
There aren’t many meaningful interactions between any of the key players. It’s the biggest weakness of the film, in that the 1989 film has fewer central characters, but they each have more interesting and engaging relationships with one another. This 2024 version has a more intricate plot and more supporting players, but it’s far shallower for those complications. Perhaps the chiefest culprit here would be “Avatar” star Sam Worthington as Finn, the Irish handler figure who gives Zee all her assignments. In the original film, there’s a sweet sort of fealty between Ah Jong and his business partner Sei (Chu Kong), such that the film’s tragic climax is built around their closeness and intimacy.
The 2024 version isn’t that kind of film. At times, it doesn’t feel like a film at all. The film’s production quality and drab color palette, along with Marco Beltrami’s wildly inconsistent score, make this feel like a feature-length TV pilot for a spin-off produced by the USA Network. It would feel right at home between reruns of “Burn Notice” and advertisements for “Monday Night Raw.” It would be unsurprising for casual fans of Woo’s not even to recognize his proven hands behind the camera. There’s very little of his trademark use of slow motion, or more pointedly, the appearance of white doves flying by in between pivotal moments of violence. In fact, we see the iconic birds exactly once, and with this version being roughly 20 minutes longer than the original, they appear at the moment the 1989 version’s credits would be rolling already.
But simultaneously, it is hard to blame Woo for not retreading his old steps. There’s far less passion on display, nowhere near as much of the incendiary bullet ballets that have become synonymous with his name. As fun and rewatchable as the 1989 film remains, at its heart, there’s a solemness to it that gives it weight. He was more than a decade into his career when he made the original, but this is coming to us with so much more experience and the hindsight of making several films directly for an American audience in the ’90s and 2000s.
Through that lens, the film is surprisingly effective on a craft level. Sure, the script is bargain bin, but how Woo constructs the movie on a scene-to-scene basis feels impressive in a way that isn’t showy. There’s an effervescence to the proceedings that calls to mind both the French New Wave aspirations of Jonathan Demme’s 2002 “The Truth About Charlie” (itself a remake of Stanley Donen’s 1963 Cary Grant film “Charade”) and his own “Mission: Impossible 2” (a blockbuster heavily inspired by the 1946 Cary Grant film “Notorious”). Aside from both films featuring Thandiwe Newton as the leading lady, the major thing both of those reference points have in common is trying to translate the energy of a bygone era into a more modern context.
Woo has always been inspired by American films from a time when there were still “real” movie stars and even the most straightforward genre pictures were still constructed with the kind of sturdy craftsmanship the studio system was known for. So, even though it may seem like he is betraying the style and tone of his own original film, he is still drawing back to his influences, just ones that exist on a fluffier, less severe end of the stylistic spectrum.
Seeing Woo toy around with split screens, nonlinear storytelling, and a sly, winking tone feels like the most exciting way he could have tackled trying to tell this story with the obstacle of budgetary constraints in his path. Whether or not it’s as good as the original is beside the point; it’s worth the price of admission alone to watch one of global cinema’s most significant living masters work within the strange new streaming normal and still pull out something of value.
“The Killer” is streaming exclusively on Peacock.
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