As much as I tend to cringe at the idea of most film remakes, for some reason, the thought of legendary Hong Kong filmmaker John Woo (Face/Off, Broken Arrow, Hard Boiled) remaking his own 1989 breakthrough work The Killer with a gender-swapped lead didn’t initially bother me on paper. Woo wrote the original; Academy Award-winner Brian Helgeland (L.A. Confidential, Mystic River) and the screenwriting team of Josh Campbell and Matt Stuecken are credited with this redo. Changing the plot very little and moving the location to Paris, this take on The Killer casts Nathalie Emmanuel (featured in the more recent entries in the Fast Saga, Game of Thrones) as the hired killer Zee (nicknamed Queen of the Dead), a mysterious hit-woman so good at her job that she’s become a legend who some in law enforcement think is a myth.
She’s given an assignment by her handler (Sam Worthington) to kill a group of thugs who recently ripped off a drug kingpin’s shipment of heroin and leave no one alive in the room. But during the firefight (with Zee opting for a samurai sword because it was easier to sneak past security), a lounge singer named Jenn (Diana Silvers, Booksmart) is accidentally blinded, and Zee refuses to kill her, which not only goes against her killer’s code but makes those who hired her very nervous, even though Jenn never saw Zee’s face. Still, having a living witness stirs the interest of both Zee’s employers and the police, led by a fearless investigator named Sey (Omar Sy), who refuses to end his search for both this shadowy killer and the source of the heroin, which seems to have ties to a filthy rich Saudi prince (Saïd Taghmaoui).
For context, when I first saw Woo’s original The Killer, it changed the way I thought action movies could be made. Woo’s visual style (complete with slow-motion, two-handed gun battles and loads of doves flying amongst the bullets) was something I’d never seen, and it added a beautifully choreographed and artistic quality to a genre I’d always believed had to play ugly and loud. And the film opened me up to the exciting world of Hong Kong action to such a degree that I spent years absorbing as many examples of it as my eyes could handle. But this new version of The Killer doesn’t suffer because it feels familiar; the struggle here is to make it different enough to make it worth watching, and while Woo does still have his doves (or maybe they’re pigeons this time around) and slo-mo, he doesn’t seem interested in breaking any new ground this time around (though that shouldn’t be entirely surprising given what he’s put out lately...remember Silent Night from last holiday season?).
It doesn’t help that Emmanuel isn’t the strongest actress. Although she’s good at making tough-girl faces during big action moments, when she’s called upon to just talk and build her character, things take a turn. Even giving her a backstory that shows us how she was recruited into the killing profession doesn’t really help deepen the Zee character, because she seems to be having a bit too much fun doing her job to allow us to believe this character is trauma-driven. She sees something familiar in Jenn’s plight, and decides not only to not kill her but also to protect the seemingly innocent singer from others wanting to do her harm. Once Zee and Sey start to work together to save Jenn and figure out this whole drug thing, I lost interest in the outcome and in Zee’s hero turn; she’s far more interesting being cold blooded and feeling justified in her work (she always asks her handler “Does this person deserve killing?” before she accepts a job).
Instead of mirroring or improving upon his early work (which is impossible, let’s be honest), Woo is simply aping some of the most groundbreaking action filmmaking of the late 20th century—his own—and it doesn’t feel right. I’ll watch anything the guy puts out, but I’ll never watch 2024’s The Killer again.
The film is now streaming exclusively on Peacock.
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