Director: John Woo
Writers: Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, Matt Stuecken
Stars: Nathalie Emmanuel, Omar Sy, Sam Worthington
Synopsis: An assassin tries to make amends in an effort to restore the sight of a beautiful young singer.
The most mind boggling aspect of The Killer is that the filmmakers are trying to gaslight their audience into thinking that Jenn (Diana Silvers), an American singer mixed up with drug dealers in Paris, wrote a song. The song that Sey (Omar Sy), a police officer on the case of the drug dealers, claims no one knows and cannot be found on Shazam. It’s a very famous song. It’s the song “Let’s Live for Today” by The Grass Roots. The song has sold a million copies. It’s been featured in many films set in the ’60s. The song itself is an English language cover of an Italian song. This is a known song. What possible purpose could the filmmakers have to try and pass it off as anything different?
It’s maybe because this film is a ghost of an imitation of the original 1989 film. The saddest aspect of which is that the producers got the original filmmaker, John Woo, on board for this. It’s not the first time this has happened. Alfred Hitchcock made a film in 1934 titled The Man Who Knew Too Much and 22 years later put out a different version with the same title, but bigger stars, a bigger budget, and a story that featured the talents of its stars better than the original. Unlike what happened with The Man Who Knew Too Much, The Killer of 2024, was produced by a major studio that put no more money into it than it would an indie it picked up from a different company. It isn’t any wonder that Universal dropped it onto Peacock instead of seeking a theatrical run.
The film, in spite of the CGI carnage and the harsh language, looks like it would belong on the USA network. The cameras and lights used make the film look like we forgot to turn off the motion smoothing on our television after watching a live event. It’s bright and has absolutely no texture. While most of the time evoking the score of the original film, composer Marco Beltrami, sometimes slips into absolutely cheesy elevator fare, which makes this seem like the straight to DVD/VOD/streaming type of film it is.
Director John Woo has lost his touch. There are many callbacks and instances of his favorite tropes like birds, abandoned buildings, motorcycles, and gunplay; but instead of being turned to eleven, he’s at about a four. It’s like someone took his joy of choreographed mayhem away. He’s fallen into the trap of many action films where they try and have the action live in the close up and cut so fast that you really don’t know what’s going on because the next image doesn’t always connect to the one before. The gunplay is less surgical, the hand to hand fighting less precise, and there weren’t enough cool slow motion moves that ooze sophistication and thought.
Though, there are things that still work. First and foremost the chemistry between Sey and Zee (Nathalie Emmanuel) is utterly fantastic. The two of them together are electric and their banter is light and has the right amount of sexual tension mixed with mutual respect. If the narrative focused on them more than the convoluted case the two of them are working on from different sides, this would have been a much more enjoyable film.
The same could be said of Sam Worthington as Finn, a lieutenant in a crime corporation. Why did studios waste so much time in the 2010s trying to make the wooden and lethargic Worthington into a leading man? Here he’s calculating, conniving, scary, and actually believable. His cold, blue eyes belie the machinations of his character. He plays a heavy very well and we should hope to see him expand his repertoire in this area.
While the plot is stunted and the film as a whole looks cheap, the action is exciting and the characters are intriguing. He fails to have the panache of his previous films, but John Woo, while stylistically reigned in to the detriment of the film, can still pull off a climactic abandoned church gun fight that has some incredible stakes and moves. It’s a pity he isn’t the filmmaker he once was and that he doesn’t take the chances he used to. Overall, if you just need an action film to put on after a dull week at work, The Killer isn’t a bad way to spend two hours, but if you want something gloriously and unabashedly over the top with the filmmaker in the midst of his renaissance, seek out the original The Killer from 1989.
