3 min. thoughts: The Killer

Life is about taking note of the small victories amidst the chaos. In saying that, I am most grateful to GKIDS film distribution for their stellar theater run over the past year. From Studio Ghibli classics like My Neighbor Totoro to a trilogy of John Woo’s finest work in Hard Boiled, A Better Tomorrow, and The Killer. With complimentary director interviews after the credits roll sharing insight on the production, it truly is a holy grail of releases to western audiences. I capped off their John Woo collection by taking in his 1989 action classic The Killer the way it was meant to, on the silver screen. 

A Better Tomorrow I and II were the jumping off points for the success of director John Woo, his collaborator and friend Tsui Hark, and the prolific Chow Yun Fat. Before the release of what’s looked at as his magnum opus in Hard Boiled in 1992, there came what I believe is his finest picture. The Killer manages to finally settle into the emotional drama that A Better Tomorrow played at first. That film deals heavily in similar themes of brotherhood (mirrored from him and Tsui Hark’s very own friendship), forgiveness, and redemption, but there’s a melodrama to it all that just feels like it hasn't gotten comfortable in its own skin yet. 

The Killer further paints with a finer brushstroke one of Woo’s favorite images; a criminal with a code of honor, a murderer with a conscience, a tortured soul looking to be saved. The movie both opens and closes in a candlelit church nestled in the countryside, a meditative chamber away from the prying eyes of the bustling Hong Kong inner-city. As our spiritually conflicted anti-hero retreats to the solace of these pews to pray, tend to his bullet wounds, or cash another contract for a human life, it offers a beautiful juxtaposition against the marble-carved angels and white-winged doves. As a Christian himself, Woo stated he wanted to express the beauty he found in religious iconography. 

Now what you came to the dance for, the action. No one conducts a symphony of violence  quite like John Woo. A bloody ballet. The stylized gunplay on a maximalist display is what makes Woo the master of the Heroic Bloodshed subgenre. There is a certain visual poetry in the way weapons are fired, and it is bullets that spell out the stanzas. Idolizing Akira Kurosawa and Jean-Pierre Melville, Woo dreamed of making his own samurai film drenched in moody atmospheric cinematography and bushido code of ethics. Rather than the sword as his symbol, he chose the gun.