John Woo's The Killer was the most balletically choreographed piece of cinematic violence since Sam Peckinpah first put gunfights into slow-mo for The Wild Bunch. It's also the most effective film in the Hong Kong gangster genre Woo set in motion with his A Better Tomorrow series, and re-coupled actors Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee, previously seen as personally entangled undercover cop and gangster in Ringo Lam's City On Fire - the plot prototype for Reservoir Dogs. With a similar dynamic based on honour (stemming as much from the Woo family's Christianity, which led to their persecution on the Chinese mainland, as from Confucianism), it pits Triad hitman Ah Jong (Chow), or 'Jef' in the subtitled version against Detective Li Ying (Lee) who respects his professionalism. He will also have cause to admire his sense of 'yi', or loyalty, if not his actions: for Jef is guilt-stricken over his accidental blinding of nightclub singer Jennie, to whom the gunman has bequeathed his own eyes in the instance of his death. Every blood-squelching squib that is burst in The Killer occurs in the name of honour. The Triad gangsters that Jef massacres wholesale have tried to cheat him out of his fee, or set him up for his own summary execution, and are therefore seen as worthy of being riddled with bullets. Woo cited his main influences in the film as Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, in which Alain Delon played an existentially-apart contract killer named Jef, and Martin Scorsese's Mean Streets. In particular, the scenes where Chow's Jef takes comfort in a church - and later shoots up the place, in a bravura set-piece that might have seemed sacrilegious in anyone else's hands - are said to have their parallel with Charlie's tortured Catholicism in Mean Streets. But Charlie and Johnny Boy are more realistic, street-level characters in Scorsese's film, the kind of hustlers and debt collectors he grew up around, and their eventual shooting is the result of a petty squabble. The avenging, strangely morally-upright killer Jef is a figure that can only exist in a pulp-fiction universe - little wonder that Tarantino claimed John Woo as a major influence at the start of his career.
Writer/editor/ghost-writer transfixed by crime, cinema and the serrated edges of popular culture. Those similarly afflicted are invited to make contact.
