If Guns Shot Angst: John Woo's The Killer

The don't make posters like these anymore

The Killer is an early John Woo hong-kong action film (“heroic bloodshed” for those in the know). Between scenes of ballistic ballet, Woo tells story of a killer with a conscience caught between the triads and the police. Chow Yun-fat plays the assassin who tries to make things right with a woman who he accidentally blinded with gunfire on one of his jobs. He makes things right can cares for her, her blindness making her unaware that he was the one caused it. He vows to take only one more job to get the money for her surgery. You know where this is going.

I can’t help but compare it to my all-time favorite Woo film, Hardboiled. In many ways, Hardboiled feels like the movie he was trying to make with The Killer. They share the same themes: Betrayal, double agents, remorse, unlikely alies, and lonely jazz in the middle of the night. But where Hardboiled had a fast-moving plot and amazing cinematography, The Killer has drawn-out story of uninteresting shots peppered with great fight scenes.

Almost all action movie plots are pretty banal without the visceral impact of shootouts and explosion, and The Killer doesn't balance this very well. It’s as if the movie takes too long to develop. I know that the first half of the movie sets up the characters, particularly Yung-Fat’s remorseful assassin, but that’s not why I’m watching this.  Hardboiled found a far better balance, often using the shootouts itself to develop the characters. 

It’s a fun movie, but I can’t help but think of it as a watered-down Heat. Where Heat explored deep masculine themes in a mature, thoughtful way (with relatively little action), The Killer makes some general platitudes and then covers in it fantasy-action.

Perhaps the ridiculous action actually is the heart of these early Woo movies. Just like creature-features don’t require plausibility to work well, Heroic Bloodshed doesn’t require much more than a few hard men with guns facing a grim world. It all depends on what the viewer is expecting. If it's an exploration of the human condition, he'll be better off watching The Patriot. But if he's looking for a pretty picture with basic masculine theme's, he could do worse.