Is John Woo Remaking 'The Killer' Even Remotely a Good Idea?
It's easy to mess up a masterpiece.
Directors don’t often remake their own movies. Off the top of my head, I can only think of Michael Haneke redoing “Funny Games” twenty years apart, Hawks repeatedly using John Wayne for different versions of “Rio Bravo,” Hitchcock giving “The Man Who Knew Too Much” a later-career revamp with a tweaked plot, and Takashi Shimizu directing both the Japanese and American versions of “The Grudge.”
Such instances are relatively few and far between, in other words, at least amidst an overwhelming tide of movies. This isn’t suprising; given the effort it takes for even a powerful director to get a film off the ground, they usually want to focus on producing something new. Which makes John Woo’s decision to remake “The Killer,” his 1989 masterpiece, a little odd: this isn’t a case of a master wanting to revamp an earlier, more amateurish work (which was Hitchcock’s ostensible motive for remaking “The Man Who Knew Too Much,” for example), and I somehow doubt Woo lacks potential projects.
The original version of “The Killer” was a virtually beat-by-beat homage to Melville’s “Le Samourai,” albeit with an exponentially higher body count. The remake will underscore that debt to the French New Wave by moving its action from 1980s Hong Kong to 2020s Paris, but the major plot points will presumably stay the same: an assassin (played by Chow Yun-Fat in the original and Nathalie Emmanuel in the remake) accidentally blinds a singer during a nightclub shootout, then takes a trope-y One Last Job for the money to help restore their sight; meanwhile, a hellbent cop (Danny Lee in the original, Omar Sy in the remake) pursues the assassin. Based on a couple of leaked stills from the new production, they’re keeping the chain-smoking to a minimum:
Copious amounts of gunfire ensue. The original’s climactic set-piece in an old church is considered one of those paragons of action cinema, combining Peckinpah-style editing with lunatic choreography and (if that wasn’t enough) operatic displays of emotion. Despite a career of iconic films (“Hard Boiled,” “Bullet in the Head,” etc.), it’s potentially Woo’s high-water mark as a director, a 15-minute stretch in which all of his obsessions and filmmaking tricks crash together like asteroids forming a new planet.
At the time, the movie’s overall effect was jaw-dropping; I remember teenage cinephiles watching it again and again on pirated VHS in the late 90s, back before tangled rights issues made it virtually impossible to find in any format. It wasn’t just the slow-motion gunfights or Chow Yun-Fat looking elegant in a silk tie and black suit as he plowed through waves of baddies or even the menacing atmosphere with its neon and cigarette smoke and sweaty linen shirts—it was the energy pulsing beneath it all, the sense that you were watching something far more alive and unpredictable than we’d find at the local multiplex.
As to be expected, such cinematic daring unleashed a host of knockoffs over the next decade, resulting in dull films like “The Replacement Killers” and “Hard Rain” that tried to copy the formula but never quite managed to capture the soul. By the end of the century, even Woo himself seemed tapped out: “Mission: Impossible 2,” in which he was gifted (or cursed?) with a mega-budget in exchange for giving Tom Cruise a sheen of insouciant cool, feels exhausted by its own pyrotechnics, like a kid who collapses after guzzling a two-liter bottle of Mountain Dew.
My question is, will Woo revive all his old tricks for the remake, or try something new? The casting of Omar Sy, the charming comedian, hints at a movie lighter on its feet than its predecessor. It doesn’t take much for a Woo gun battle to transform into a Busby Berkeley musical number. But whatever Woo chooses to do, it would be great if he evolved past his legacy, producing something that would make even the most innovative of the contemporary action directors, like Gareth Evans and Timo Tjahjanto, take a step back in awe.