The Killer
JOHN WOO’S ICONIC BALLET OF BLOOD
WHEN HONG KONG filmmaker John Woo described his 1986 film A Better Tomorrow, he said, “It’s not a gangster movie. It’s a film about chivalry, about honour, but set in the modern world. I want to teach the new generation: ‘What is friendship? What is brotherhood? What we have lost. What we have to get back…’” This statement would prove to be Woo’s credo, one perfectly expressed in his 1989 film The Killer.
It’s a philosophy shaped by Woo’s childhood, when the filmmaker witnessed extraordinary violence. In 1967 alone, there were two riots in Hong Kong — he watched people die in front of his door. Every day, he encountered gangs on his way home. The church and the cinema became his sanctuary. These experiences formed both his staunchly pacifist worldview and his work. In
The Killer, as in all Woo’s films, violence becomes something transcendent, a purifying force — it’s an intrinsic part of a corrupt world, but it’s also necessary to exorcise evil and redeem our heroes.
The story is simple: during a hit gone wrong, Chow Yun-fat’s killer Ah Jong accidentally blinds Jennie (Sally Yeh), a nightclub singer. He wants to atone, to pay for the surgery to save her eyesight. But after triad leader Wong Hoi (Shing Fui-on) hires him for the always ill-fated One Last Job, he decides to put a hit out on Ah Jong instead of pay him. While the hitman tries to stay alive, he crosses paths with Danny Lee’s Inspector Li Ying.
At the time, Hong Kong action movies were dominated by martial arts and swordplay; it was Woo who first married traditional Chinese chivalric movies with the modern gangster film, then integrated gunplay from Western cinema. The Killer was also informed by Jean-pierre Melville, Jacques Demy, Sam Peckinpah, Martin Scorsese, Cantonese opera, ancient Chinese assassins, Teruo Ishii’s An Outlaw, even MAD magazine’s
Spy Vs Spy, which inspired the iconic image of Ah Jong and Li Ying pulling their guns on each other in a scene bordering on slapstick. Woo transmutes it all into a style that’s uniquely, unmistakably his: a propulsive blend of masculinity, musicality, melancholy, sentimentality and dreamy romanticism, climaxing in an operatic bloodbath.
But The Killer didn’t have an easy trip to the screen. The studio would only make it if they could get Chow Yun-fat. The actor had previously been deemed “box-office poison” — until Woo cast him in A Better Tomorrow, which transformed him into a huge star and made him too busy for The Killer.
Woo had to wait a year, but it was worth it. The Killer didn’t need an action star, it needed Chow Yun-fat: an elegant, romantic leading man who evoked Alain Delon. His co-star Danny Lee had actually nearly become a cop himself, but became an actor who played one instead. It was a perfect marriage. Woo said, “When we were casting, we put Chow and Lee’s pictures together, and they looked like a strong pair — you believe they could overcome the world.”
During production, Woo continued to face opposition. Tsui Hark didn’t like that the story centred on a hitman, even a hitman with a heart of gold; he thought audiences would prefer a movie about the cop. Woo wanted jazz; Tsui thought Jennie should sing pop songs. He wanted Woo to cut all the slow-motion, and there were just too many bullets flying, the heroes left miraculously unscathed. Thankfully, Woo stuck to his guns.
The chaotic production lasted 92 days. Sally Yeh got shrapnel in her leg, Chow Yun-fat had a squib injure his eye. (Hong Kong stuntmen, however, thrived in these dangerous conditions, according to Woo.) During the scene where Li Ying tries to save a hostage on the tram, the blanks they fired were so loud that onlookers thought a real robbery was going down, and Danny Lee had to talk the police into letting them finish shooting. Producer Terence Chang, who would later work with Woo on the likes of Hard Boiled, admitted that the director wasn’t the easiest to work with — as a “very intuitive filmmaker”, Woo never planned or storyboarded his shots, so no-one ever knew what they’d be doing until they were doing it.
Despite these difficulties, Woo prevailed. The Killer was an international success, one that fundamentally altered cinema forever, inspiring filmmakers from Quentin Tarantino to the Wachowskis. It’s become a familiar formula: the cop and the killer are mirrors; only a badge separates them. Their unlikely friendship begins when Ah Jong saves a little girl injured during a shootout.
In this heroic act, Li Ying recognises a kindred spirit. It separates Ah Jong from other killers, reveals his heart, a code of honour. Their cat-andmouse game starts to feel more like a flirtation.
The fabric of the film itself connects the men: when the cop imagines being the killer, Woo uses an experimental tracking shot to alternate between the two actors sitting in the same chair. And then there’s those sensuous dissolves between Li Ying and Ah Jong as they think of each other, blurring the lines between them. Though they’re on the opposite side of the law, they’re the same: knights in tarnished armour, the last pure-hearted heroes in a cruel world.
The triad villains are their cosmic opposites: motivated only by money and power, they have no loyalty or honour. When they come for Ah Jong and Li Ying during the film’s finale, they transform Woo’s idea of heaven — the church — into a hell on earth. The priest’s executed, candles extinguished, and the Virgin Mary statue — a symbol of all that’s good and pure — destroyed in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil.
Each man suffers a cruel fate: before his death, Ah Jong is blinded by gunfire like Jennie, and Li Ying himself becomes a criminal when he kills Wong Hoi to avenge his friend. “In the end,” Woo said, “death wins over the criminal, and law wins over the cop. It’s a little pessimistic. That’s the world we live in.”
The Killer is a singular work, an action movie made not like an action movie but an opera, a romance, a musical. An elegy for chivalry. For all its brutality, bullets and bloodshed, it is a film about redemption, sacrifice and the unexpected friendship between two seemingly different men, brought together by a shared, outmoded belief in love and justice.
THE KILLER IS OUT NOW ON DVD, BLU-RAY AND DIGITAL