THE KILLER Movie Review
Die Xue Shuang Xiong
The ads read: “Guaranteed: Ten Thousand Bullets.” And Hong Kong director John Woo is as good as his word. Hit man Jeffrey Chow (Chow Yun-Fat), better known on the streets as Mickey Mouse, feels responsible for accidentally blinding night club singer Jenny (Sally Yeh) while pulling a job. The demoralized Jeffrey decides to take on one last assignment to pay for surgery to restore Jenny's eyesight; the dedicated Detective Lee (Danny Lee), better known as Dumbo, develops a strange respect for the driven, secretive hit man, though he's bound by law to bring him to justice. “You're an unusual cop,” says Mickey Mouse to Dumbo. “Well, you're an unusual killer,” is his reply. If the plot sounds like a bonkers blend of City Lights, La ?οhème, and The Wild Bunch, you're not far off. Yet the utter originality and stylistic power of John Woo's The Killer makes real comparisons of any kind impossible. It's a violent movie, all right, but Woo's violence is an expressionistic form of pure, unashamed melodrama, rooted in new urban mythology. (If West Side Story had been made by John Woo, my childhood would have been a lot more fun.) Chow's nobility is visible through his sneer. He's a great action star; sullen, deeply sentimental, unhesitatingly violent. He shoots with a gun in each hand, as do so many characters in Woo's movies—it's almost a symbol of his commitment. Mickey Mouse and Dumbo are an endangered movie species; gallant, world-weary men of action who are capable of respecting each other, regardless of their being on opposite sides of the law. If you thought such sentiments went out with Grand Illusion, take a look at The Killer. Describing it as “gratuitously” violent seems itself gratuitous; violence—what it can do, what it can't do, its natural expressive power in the cinema—is the subject of the film. Funny, shocking, outrageous, and sweet, this is Woo's demented, glorious masterpiece.
NEXT STOP … A Better Tomorrow, Hard-Boiled, Face/Off
1990 (R) 110m/C HK Chow Yun-Fat, Sally Yeh, Danny Lee, Kenneth Tsang, Chu Kong; D: John Woo; W: John Woo; C: Wing-hang Wong, Peter Pau; M: Lowell Lo. VHS, Letterbox FXL, BTV, FCT