The Killerdirected by John Woo, is now streaming on Peacock. It is not The Killerdirected by David Fincher, which is streaming on Netflix. But it is also not The Killerdirected by John Woo, which the Hong Kong-based filmmaker shot in 1989, which he also wrote himself and which became a classic of Bullet Ballet, even though it shares parts with Woo’s first attempt at this material. Woo’s new killer is in love with Paris and the way Nathalie Emmanuel, who replaces Chow Yun-fat as the titular assassin in the original, pirouetting past flying bullets in the City of Light. Zee (Emmanuel) has always been the best. But when a job goes wrong, she suddenly finds herself in the middle of a battle between the Paris underworld, the police and the people she thought she could trust. The Killer also plays Omar Sy from lupine fame, and Sam Worthington, who fully embraces a completely bizarre Irish accent.
The essentials: Reinventing your own life The KillerIt won’t be long until John Woo’s new killer finds herself in a dilapidated church where cooing doves appear against stained glass. The religious imagery is strong—a desecrated holy place, emptied like the soul of our highly trained assassin Zee (Emmanuel). Zee, notorious in Paris for her skill and mysteriousness, takes jobs from Finn (Worthington), and always with the same caveat. “Do they deserve this death?” We assume all of her targets during her 15-year career met that criterion, and she assumes the sinister gang in silk shirts in a private party room do, too. Oh, and don’t bother searching them. The guns are there, but you can’t see them. Until she springs into action. And in hindsight, cops like Sey (Sy) wonder how someone could murder a couple of guys with a samurai sword and leave the club unnoticed.
Zee and Finn’s relationship is built on a kind of trust, but her hard-won independence is what really guides her, and that stands her in good stead when everything goes wrong. Jenn (Diana Silvers), a singer at the nightclub, isn’t entirely innocent of the chaos going on around her, but she’s more innocent than most, and Zee feels terrible for partially blinding her during the attack. In her, Zee sees the hope for a good life that she abandoned long ago. But Finn sees Jenn as nothing more than a liability, because the singer is a connection to $350 million worth of heroin that’s in the air and that various criminal interests are trying to get their hands on. (Sӓid Taghmaoui is entertaining in his brief scenes as a Saudi prince caught up in the drug conspiracy.) And as Sey fends off internal pressure from his superiors at the police department, he also develops a growing fascination with Zee. On the street, she’s known as the Queen of the Dead. But Sey realizes that Zee’s moral code is not so different from his own.
The more ridiculous Sam Worthington’s Irish accent becomes in The murderer, the more tense the situation in Paris becomes, and soon everyone is targeting the unlikely duo Zee and Sey. They stand back to back, turn around and shoot at their attackers with revolvers and nine-millimeter weapons. In some of the film’s quieter moments, they wax philosophical (“You’d be me” – if Sey weren’t a cop – “and I’d be you.”) And follow them back to the abandoned church, whose old cemetery will surely provide some new resting places. Only when Zee lights a votive for your soul do you realize you’ve lost it.
What movies will it remind you of? In The KillerWhen Nathalie Emmanuel’s Zee says things like “If you live by a code, you are honorable; shame is not an issue,” her killer seems to have a kinship with Michael Fassbender’s process-driven assassin in David Fincher’s The KillerAnd there is nothing wrong with enjoying the self-referentiality of Woo’s film, like the motorcycle theatricality he combines with Mission: Impossible IIor Zee and Sey, who represent the ethos of In the face/out which represent two faces on two sides of the same violent coin.
Remarkable performance: Over time, Emmanuel and Omar Sey develop a really good chemistry in The Killerso much so that we would love to see them together in a sequel. (The Killer?) But we will highlight Tchéky Karo here, not because he starred in Michael Bay’s Bullet Ballet tribute Bad Boysbut because the ever-reliable Karo plays a studied, wise seamstress who both watches over Zee and creates garments for her with integrated tactical features, John Wick-Style.
Memorable dialogue: The Legend of the Reine des Morts“The Queen of the Dead,” says Sey’s police friend. “A murderess so elusive and so skilled that no one has ever seen her.”
Sex and skin: Nothing here. When she is not committing contract killings, Zee is too busy living her life with a goldfish named Y and her beloved The World Crossword puzzle.
Our opinion: Nowadays you see it often in action movies, the dynamic takedown of an opponent through a full body leg wrap wrestling throw. But because John Woo is John Woo and he is an innovator in this field, you see it done differently and better in The Killer. There are a lot of familiar parts in this movie, things you can point to like Leo in the meme and say “Woo-ism!” And yes, some of those parts don’t really land. Some of the action scenes can feel a little odd, some of the chases are too long, that sort of thing. But the flaws are minor in the face of what is fantastic. Nathalie Emmanuel is cool and cold-blooded as Zee, the assassin. But she also finds her heart and lets that sensitivity simmer alongside all the chaos. Omar Sy is funny as Sey, like when he does his awkward best to mimic one of Zee’s more balletic escape moves, but Sy also builds a nice rapport with Emmanuel that stretches the distance in The Killer where killing is not the only feature.
The Killer shares a common thread with a whole bunch of VOD action movies, the kind of random stuff that clogs up the “what to watch” boxes of many streamers. What’s better is the casting of Emmanuel and Sy, who are both great, and how it becomes a welcome return of John Woo’s signature moves. It does what many movies do. It just does it with Woo.
Our call: STREAM IT. John Woo’s reinterpreted The Killer revels in its Parisian setting immensely, unleashes an eager, charming Nathalie Emmanuel on an assassin character full of creative murder methods, and maintains Woo’s long-standing reverence for fluttering birds and violence in beams of light.
Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is a freelance writer and editor based in the Chicago area. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.
