Doves. Blood. Bullets. Homoerotic undertones. Yup… It’s a John Woo movie.
No matter how much his time in Hollywood may have tarnished his legacy, John Woo is still one of the most vital and important directors around. Wildly overdramatic to the point where his films almost become comedic, Woo’s classic Hong Kong output still stands the test of time as some of the greatest action and crime movies ever made. Everyone knows him for his operatic gunfights, but all of the squib hits and the slow-mo doves and the hundreds of thousands of spent ammunition wouldn’t mean a damn if Woo didn’t craft compelling characters to populate them. He brought an art-house sensibility to his simple Hong Kong crime thrillers, drawing on sources as varied as classic Hollywood musicals to the urban morality plays of the 70’s by luminaries such as Martin Scorsese. Nowhere are these influences more prominent than in what many consider to be his magnum opus, 1989’s The Killer.
The biggest inspiration for Woo here is Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai. Much like Melville did for his star Alain Delon, John Woo turns Chow Yun-Fat into an instant icon of cinematic cool. Chow plays Ah Jong (known as Jeff Chow in some international releases, furthering the connection to Le Samourai). Just like Jef Costello, we follow Ah Jong on a hit in a nightclub, where things go horribly wrong. The singer Jenny (Sally Yeh) is blinded in the ensuing gun battle and, feeling guilty, Ah Jong begins watching over her - falling in love in the process. Also drawn into the story is police inspector Li (Danny Lee), who forms a rocky partnership with Ah Jong once he’s suspended from his investigation into the Triads.
When talking about cool tough guys of the silver screen, you’ve got Steve McQueen, Clint Eastwood… and Chow Yun-Fat. Nowhere is this more apparent than in his collaborations with John Woo, and in A Better Tomorrow (the duo‘s first film together), Chow’s supporting role made him an overnight success - where his trench coat, sunglasses and matchstick at the corner of the mouth became instantly iconic. His style is no less impeccable in The Killer, where he wears a fancy suit and white scarf that recalls the immaculate style of Alain Delon in Le Samourai. But while he’s completely competent and cooler than cool, there’s not a lot to Ah Jong other than what’s on the surface. Ah Jong is a generally stand-up guy, despite his being paid to kill people for a living. Whereas Delon and Alan Ladd in This Gun For Hire portrayed their hitmen as morally ambiguous and socially broken, Chow Yun-Fat’s Ah Jong is a romantic hero, through and through - he’s a hitman, true, but he only kills bad people and is otherwise completely chivalrous and noble. While Woo is clearly a devotee of Meville’s, his approach to filmmaking couldn’t be any different - Melville sought to plumb the depths of the psychosis of a character like Jef Costello; realizing that such a man in real life would have a whole host of problems. Woo is too much of a romantic to make his hero too flawed, and so the interesting psychology is all but ignored in favor of traditional heroic tropes. In Woo’s films, the good guys are good and the bad guys are bad - there’s room for complexity, and Woo’s characters are never uninteresting, but more often than not, what’s on the surface of a John Woo film is typically all there is to it.
Le Samourai focused almost exclusively on Jef Costello, but the police were still a significant presence throughout. A subtle undercurrent running through the movie was how the methods of the police mirrored Jef’s methods, and vice versa. Woo elaborates on that with his film, pairing Chow Yun-Fat up with the police inspector played by Danny Lee. Lee’s cop is as suitably uncomplicated as Chow’s: a typical hard-as-nails policemen who’s consistently undercut by the bureaucracy of the force. He’s pretty hot on Ah Jong’s tail for the majority of the film, but after much glaring and Mexican standoff-ing, the two develop a mutual respect. Much has been written about the male bonding in Woo’s films extending into homosexual territory, and indeed, the character of Jenny seems to exist primarily to break up all the bromancing going on. But Woo is a director far too in love with melodrama and completely (and wonderfully) incapable of any kind of subtlety, so even the smallest moments are blown up into wildly overemotional scenes. The movie isn’t exactly a romance between the two men, but there is a tenderness to their relationship that makes The Killer unique amongst action films.
Melville is a cinematic hero to Woo, but the two couldn’t be any more different when it comes to direction. Melville preferred stark minimalism, quiet and often introspective scenes with little in the way of action - the emotions were always at a distance, threatening to creep in at the sides of the frame. Woo is the complete opposite, wearing a beating, blood-red heart on his sleeve. Woo’s frame explodes with vibrant colors and kinetic energy, and the director uses slow-motion, freeze-framing and dissolves to such an extent it becomes almost comical - fitting, as Melville’s film was also stylized to such an extent as to be darkly comedic in and of itself. The stylization is extremely important to both the characters of Jef and Ah Jong - but while Melville made a point that the style was there to hide Jef’s otherwise empty soul, for Woo it’s just an affectation.
And, oh yeah… the shoot-outs. You haven’t really lived until you’ve seen a John Woo shoot-out. It’s here Woo wears his most obvious cinematic influence - and while he borrows pretty liberally from the slo-mo, staccato-edited bullet ballets of Sam Peckinpah, Woo distinguishes himself by ratcheting everything up another notch. It’s not enough to shoot a man once at point blank range; better to shoot him six times whilst diving sideways through the air. Woo’s action scenes are carefully choreographed fits of madness; the air around his characters filled with explosions of blood, sparks and other bits of flying debris as they both dish out and receive far more punishment than the human body is capable of - there’s a reason Woo’s films would later receive the dubbing of “Heroic Bloodshed.”
It’s a far different movie than it’s source of inspiration, but if The Killer were only a mere rehash of Le Samourai, we wouldn’t be talking about it.
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