Country: Hong Kong
Genre: Bullet Ballet
Director: John Woo
Year: 1989
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA HIGHLY RECOMMENDED MOVIE
The Killer is the most deeply nutty of Hong Kong flicks, and for that reason, I don’t recommend it as the first Hong Kong flick you see. It’s something like a soap opera crossed with a balls out action flick.
You see, Jeff (Chow Yun-Fat) is a hired killer who accidentally damages the corneas of lounge singer Jennie (Sally Yeh) when she stands too close to him while he’s firing a gun. Jeff is determined to take on one last contract to pay for the corneal transplants Jennie needs to avoid going permanently blind.
That “one last job” inevitably goes badly, and now Jeff’s employer, Hay Wong Hoi (the great Shing Fui-On), is after him, as well as cops Inspector Li (Danny Lee) and Sargeant Tsang (Kenneth Tsang).
Sounds pretty standard, right? Not in the hands of director John Woo. There is not one, not two, but three sweaty, inadvertently homoerotic male friendships in the film. The most florid relationship is the one that develops between hitman Jeff and Inspector Li, who is pursuing him (nudge, nudge, wink, wink). How that friendship develops over the course of the film is the emotional heart of the movie.
Boy, does John Woo ask you to swallow a lot (no pun intended). During the climactic shootout, the action is liable to pause for a good ten to twenty seconds to allow for soulful looks between Danny Lee and Chow Yun-Fat. It makes old westerns from the 1950s look like models of realism in comparison.
The conversations between Jeff and Lieutenant Li about honor and friendship are so on the nose, they’re borderline absurd (maybe some of it didn’t come through the translation). Here’s a sample:
Li: Do all killers have a sense of honor?
Jeff: Our world is changing so fast, honor’s a dirty word.
In one standoff, they refer to each other as Dumbo and Mickey Mouse.
It’s clear that if you are expecting anything approaching realism, you are going to hate The Killer.
And then there’s the shootouts. Invariably, it’s one or two men against scores of gunmen. Hundreds of bullets are fired and yet are heroes manage to escape time and again.
So, what’s the value of The Killer (if anything)? Simply this: it pushes male bonding, fetishistic gunplay, and melodrama as far as they can possibly go and beyond. Very few films dare to be this extreme. It’s also quite well made.
The action, most of which involves guns, is like Sam Peckinpah on acid. People fly through the air, through windows, off of scaffoldings, etcetera, etcera in invariably graceful balletic ways. These gunbattles have more in common with a Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers dance routine than with most firefights. Part of that might have to do with the great Tony Ching Siu-Tung, who’s the action director for The Killer. Normally, Tony Ching Siu-Tung choreographs martial arts, but there’s very little of that here, at least conventionally. In this case, he was choreographing the falls and rolls of the gunmen, in close collaboration with John Woo. That’s why the action is so graceful. (It probably also helps that the gunmen are martial artists/actors who have appeared in many Kung Fu movies.)
The action is also hard-hitting. There are more juicy bullet hits in The Killer than ten ordinary action films. It’s quite excessive. Another hallmark of John Woo’s is that, even though the gunmen miss our heroes repeatedly, they manage to hit everything around them. When a machine gun is fired at our boys, they may emerge without a scratch, but it sure tears up the floors around them. There’s property damage galore: door frames splinter, windows explode into showers of glass, lamps disintegrate, even a statue of Jesus isn’t exempt from the destruction.
With so much going on, you could almost miss how fluid cinematographer Peter Pau’s camera work is. John Woo also uses framing and slow motion in some very expressive ways as well. For example, in one series of shots of Jeff sitting in a chair smoking a cigarette, he repeatedly uses the frames of a window as a cutting device. Every time the camera passes the window frame and obscures Jeff, Woo jump-cuts to Jeff closer up. The result is a sort of iconography.
Another big plus for me is the acting. The Killer is chock full of wonderful character actors from late 80s Hong Kong cinema: Paul Chu, Tommy Wong, James Ha, Ricky Yi, Teddy Yip, and Lam Chung. And none of that sissy kitchen sink realism for John Woo — he clearly told his actors to emote for the cheap seats.
In the end, The Killer is a melodrama to end all melodramas, a Douglas Sirk weepie with machine guns. That’s both it’s strength and it’s weakness.
Seeing The Killer is quite a shock to the system, but it doesn’t move me as much as it might because it’s so hyperbolic that I’m constantly being reminded I’m watching a movie. I never get the chance to accept the reality of the story on it’s own terms. So, as I see the tragedy unfolding on the screen, I can appreciate it, but it doesn’t break my heart the way John Woo would want it to.
As Lieutenant Li tells Jeff, “You can’t always win, but you can’t always lose, either.”
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