John Woo’s The Killer
Watching John
Woo’s masterpiece The Killer on the big screen last week it was a really
nostalgic experience. It was hard to
believe just many clichés this film spawned and how so much of the avant-garde
touches have become a standard part of Hollywood filmmaking these days. Chow Yun Phat stars as Jeff.
The print I saw was subtitled and in the subtitles they gave all the
characters English first names yet they still had Chinese surnames like Chan
and Lee. I’m not sure if they’re trying
to fool me into thinking this takes place in America or something.
Jeff is a hitman with a code of honour or at least a system of
rationalizing killing for money. He says
he only kills men who deserves to die yet also asks no questions to his handler
about his targets. I guess a black and
white glossy headshot is enough to decide whether somebody deserves to
die. Makes me wonder why we waste all
this money on a court system.
He’s got an odd
habit of amassing collateral damage.
During a hit he blinds an innocent singer, Jenny, and so he starts
dating her. I like how he tries to court
her by making himself useful. It seems
he’s no good at opening tight jars or fixing cars and his only skill is
violence, so he waits until she is being mugged to beat up her muggers. Better than a box of chocolates any day of
the week. Later in the film a child gets
shot in a gunfight and he pulls some risky moves to go back and rescue her and
I was wondering if he was going to adopt her and then run over a dog and end up
with a whole family amassed from the messy parts of his work, but he does not
adopt the girl. Maybe he left her so
that Jean Reno could adopt her as a sister for Natalie Portman.
Since Jeff
takes the damage he causes so personally you’d think he’d play things a little
safer. He’s one of these pro hitmen who don’t both with bulletproof vests and when he
goes on a driveby he chooses a jeep with no roof or
doors so that he sits high up and fully exposed. He’s also not big on discretion. No silencers on his pistols. He also frequently wears all white suits, not
good in a profession that involves blood spraying
everywhere and where you have to sneak away from places where you’ve just made
a whole lot of commotion.
Jeff is
reflective, employing the often-used DTV hallmark of having flashbacks to
things that just happened. Ten minutes
into the film he has a flashback that summarizes the first ten minutes of the
film. I like that he is a guy who thinks
about his day, but at some points in the film it gets very silly because this
movie does not take place over a long period of time. I understand in movies they frequently have a
character having flashbacks to something that we the audience just saw but is
many years ago for the character. But
some of this stuff just seems like a guy thinking back over his day to see
where he might have dropped his keys or something. But it is definitely Woo’s juxtaposition of
exploitive ultra-violence with corny sentimentality that gives his films their
distinct flavour.
The plot moves
along in some pretty predictable ways by modern standards. You’ve got the killer taking on one last job
for a whole lot of money and it going horribly wrong and having to fight the
evil organization he worked for etc etc. Even when these plot elements were fresh, or
at least more fresh, or at least when I was young and
hadn’t seen them a million times yet, the point of a John Woo movie was never
really the plotting. It’s the style and
the excess. Woo’s obsessions with
firearms and men’s fashions are what we come to see.
And boy does Woo deliver in this film.
I’ve never seen an organization with so many on-call assassins. There’s just an endless army of guys in nice
business suits to pour into every room and get shot up. It’s easy to believe that you could just stay
on this company’s payroll as a hitman for years and
never show up for work because there’s just so many of these guys that several
are bound to get lost in the shuffle.
There are also
these henchmen who wear cotton jogging suits.
I assume they are lower in ranking than the guys in suits and ties. Or maybe the bad guy, Tony, just runs his
organization so that everybody can shoot and is ready to die and the guys in
suits are the office staff and the guys in trackies
are the janitors. Watching endless
hoards of these guys sprint into bullets is pure joy. There’s a really funny shootout in a church
where these guys keep pouring into the church from all sides and Jeff keeps
gunning them down but their bodies keep disappearing as soon as they hit the
ground like a video game. Or maybe the
church just has really good cleaning staff.
The Killer proves that John Woo is the mast of bullet ballet and
Chow Yun Phat is his bullet
Baryshnikov.
Statistics:
IMDB puts the
body count for this film at 120.
I put the count
of guys who are smart enough to wear bulletproof vests at 1.
I put the
number of people who die from something other than bullets at 1.5 because on
lady dies from a heart attack from watching somebody get shot so that sorta counts.
Actually, I thought this film dealt with mystical people like Highlander
who can only be killed one way, by bullets, until the one part where
Jeff stabs somebody in the back.
I give this
movie a full awesomeness rating.
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