THE KILLER
(Chinatown Video)
Reviewed by Jonathan
Marshall
Together with other Chow Yun Fat vehicles such as the A Better Tomorrow series, Hard Boiled and City on Fire, The Killer is one of the defining films
of late ‘80s Hong Kong gangster cinema. Siren has re-released the film in a
letter-box widescreen format with excellent subtitles penned by the SBS translation unit.
For those few action freaks who haven’t seen one of these flicks, the tone, style and
even some of the themes of the John Woo / Chow projects
has been replicated in US movies such as Face/Off, Broken Arrow (both
directed by Woo), Ronin, Heat, The Specialist,
Assassins, Desperado, Reservoir Dogs and even Drop Zone.
The themes are familiar: good criminal/bad criminal, criminal ethics, the importance of
your word, intense masculine friendships that cross the cop/killer divide, the modern
gangster as a kind of knight errant or samurai adrift in a world which no longer values
his code, and so on.
All of the Woo / Chow trademarks are
here: guns that fire pellets with an effect closer to explosives than buckshot,
double-fisted automatic pistol fire, the long slide on the back to enable the hero to pick
off assailants soaring overhead, and so on. In terms of cinematography, Woo is
fixated on a number of key scenes, images and snippets of dialogue which recur throughout
the film. Every flying body, every frenzied explosion, is captured from all angles and
replayed before our eyes, magnifying each action and cinematic effect until it becomes
heavy with symbolism and force. Consequently, The Killer seems to come from a
more photographic or painterly aesthetic than the manicly mobile, almost absurdly
cinematic imagery of contemporary Hollywood. The final baroque / gothic shoot-out in the
Catholic church is paradigmatic of this approach, at once operatic in its excess and vast
body-count, yet punctuated by crystallised moments of quiescence as the camera lingers on
a dove launching itself into the air, a statue of the Virgin exploding with the
enemies’ bullets, or Chow and co-star Danny Lee
quietly striding towards their foes. In its combination of insanely over-the-top gunplay
with almost meditative, ultra-cool moments, The Killer is one of the finest
action films of the last twenty years.
© 2000 Jonathan Marshall
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