10 Most Influential Action Movies Ever Made
4. The Killer
John Woo perfected his signature style of balletic violence, operatic shootouts and judicious use of slow-motion in The Killer, one of the defining films in the 'heroic bloodshed' sub-genre of Honk Kong filmmaking, a stone-cold classic of action cinema that would influence filmmakers across the globe.
Opting for sheer visual panache in favor of any tangible sense of realism, The Killer's expertly-choreographed and ultra-violent displays of hyper-stylized gunplay and heroes that operate under a strict moral code would see a more Eastern influence seep into Hollywood action movies throughout the 1990s.
As well as spawning countless thinly-veiled imitations from Honk Kong, Hollywood also took notice of The Killer. Noted fan Quentin Tarantino references it in Jackie Brown, and Kill Bill takes some more obvious cues from Woo's filmography.
Tarantino's buddy Robert Rodriguez has admitted that both El Mariachi and Desperado pay homage to The Killer, while the similarities found in Luc Besson's Nikita and Leon are surely no coincidence. Of course, there is another famous blockbuster that showed the heavy influence of 'heroic bloodshed'...