John Woo’s Remake of The Killer Should’ve Been Put on Ice

There are a handful of directors who have remade their own movies… to varying degrees of success. Michael Haneke remade his disturbingly dark thriller Funny Games into a far inferior English-language version. On the other hand, Michael Mann turned a failed TV pilot into one of his all-time masterpieces, Heat. John Woo’s remake of his action movie classic, The Killer, falls somewhere in between.

Woo’s 1989 The Killer is a landmark achievement in Hong Kong action cinema — an over-the-top, wildly melodramatic crime flick that cemented the director as a global leader in action filmmaking and solidified star Chow Yun-Fat as the coolest guy who ever lived. So it may seem like an exciting prospect that, 35 years later, Woo would return to the film that put him on the map. In reality, it’s more like a lesser evil.

A Hollywood adaptation of The Killer has been in the works since 1992, going through a handful of directors like Walter Hill and John H. Lee, and a revolving door of potential stars, from Richard Gere to Denzel Washington, Michelle Yeoh, and Lupita Nyong'o. But the project remained in stasis for nearly two decades until 2015, when John Woo announced that he would return to Hollywood and direct the remake himself — as if saving the film from the fate of being butchered by other hands. But still, it would take almost another decade until the film would limp over the finish line, this time with Nathalie Emmanuel in the lead role opposite Omar Sy’s cop. By that time, the remake was being shuttled off to a streaming platform, with no theatrical release in sight. And the finished product, while still maintaining Woo’s singular sense of operatic blockbuster style, sadly feels as small and insignificant as its streaming premiere would portend.

The Killer follows Zee (Emmanuel), a seasoned assassin living in Paris, who takes jobs assigned by her handler and mentor Finn (Sam Worthington), the man who rescued her from a life of poverty. But Zee is a killer with a code: she only kills targets that “deserve their death.” However, her latest mission goes awry when a nightclub singer Jenn (Diana Silvers) is caught in the crossfire of Zee’s massacre of a group of criminals who stole a shipment of heroin from a Saudi prince (Saïd Taghmaoui). When Finn orders her to kill Jenn to tie up loose ends, Zee goes rogue. While uncovering the truth of who really hired her, Zee finds herself unexpectedly allied with a deeply intuitive cop Sey (Omar Sy) who shares more than a few similarities with her.

The Killer pioneered so much of what makes modern action cinema — the DNA of the Hong Kong action classic can be seen in everything from The Matrix to John Wick — so it’s a relief to say that Woo is still no slouch when it comes to delivering hard-boiled action and wildly over-the-top visuals. There are touches of the old Woo here (plenty of slow-motion shots of doves), and some exciting new tricks, with Woo experimenting with shaky POV shots, sliding split screens, and one particularly mind-melting transition involving split diopter and a poisoned martini glass. The action is decent, with Sy taking to the hard-hitting action like a natural, and Emmanuel proving to be acrobatic if sometimes awkward. Both are game to do stunts that feel like Woo synthesizing all the films that he influenced in addition to his own (one particular stunt feels like Woo nodding to The Matrix). And Woo pays plenty of homage to his original film, bringing back the loose premise of the original film and even the musical motifs — the original theme from the 1989 film is there, and there is no shortage of sexy saxophone solos on Marco Beltrami’s score.

But still, something’s missing. There’s something a little visually glassy with Woo’s new remake of The Killer. Woo innovates, but without the deranged go-for-broke energy of his original film; an inevitable side effect of becoming an older and more mature filmmaker. However, it does make one wish that Woo wasn’t spending his twilight years retracing his greatest hits.

But despite some impressive setpieces and one particularly spectacular church shootout, the 2024 The Killer feels more clinical and austere. It’s taking itself a little more seriously and no longer coasting by on vibes — a shift that comes courtesy of Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, and Matt Stuecken’s script. The script offers a more complex story than the original Killer (which Woo admits he shot without a script), but one that eventually becomes more convoluted and, ironically, more generic. In the end, it’s less like a movie about the two coolest guys on opposite sides of the law and more about a seasoned killer’s crisis of conscience; which ironically makes it kind of a typical female assassin movie.

The Killer is not as much of a disaster as its inauspicious release on Peacock would suggest. But neither is it a film that feels like it should exist. It’s as if Woo, by stepping in to remake his own movie, acted less out of genuine excitement to revisit his original classic and more to prevent anyone else from making it. It’s a stopgap of a movie — one with some impressive moments and charismatic actors, but without any of the red-hot blood that made the original genuinely cool.

The Killer is streaming on Peacock now.