No Substance #198: John Woo's The Killer
A lot of director’s don’t remake their films, for obvious financial and time reasons, but some do. Alfred Hitchcock remade The Man Who Knew Too Much. Yasujirō Ozu remade A Story of Floating Weeds into Floating Weeds. Cecil B. DeMille remade The Ten Commandments. Michael Mann remade L.A. Takedown into Heat. And John Woo remade The Killer.
In fact, John Woo has done this before. In the 1997, he remade his 1991 film, Once A Thief, for a Canadian audience. It was more a pilot than an actual film, and a TV series followed, though it only lasted one season. But still, this is Woo’s second time remaking his own film, and I’m not sure how many other directors can claim they’ve done this.
The remake of The Killer has been rumoured to be in the works since the 1990s. I don’t think it was intended to become a TV show. It was always meant to be a Western adaptation of a popular ‘foreign’ film. I’ve never understood the need for that, but it’s a fairly standard thing, and works both ways as well. In relation to The Killer, the stories say that Walter Hill was reportedly set to direct at one point, but that didn’t happen. There have been various stars mentioned, including Michelle Yeoh and Lupita Nyong’o. As with these things there were rewrites, different visions, concerns about homoeroticism, and various failed attempts to begin production. Finally, Woo sat down to direct a remake of his original film and he replaced Chow Yun-fat with Nathalie Emmanuel and Danny Lee with Omar Sy in his new version. Sally Yeh was replaced by Diana Silvers.
I saw the original The Killer years ago. I own, in fact, a VHS tape of it. This obviously speaks to how with it I am now, and not that I am a horrible hoarder of physical media, and perhaps old. But for the moment, lets just say that I saw the film a while back and liked it. It’s not my favourite Woo, that’s Hard Boiled, but it’s close. The Killer’s plot is pretty simple. Chow Yun-fat plays Ah Jong, an assassin, who while on a job, accidentally blinds Yeh’s Jennie. Overcome with guilt, he watches Jenny as she performs in bars, and saves her from a robbery. They form their own romance and, later, Ah Jong takes on one last job to raise the money for an operation for Jennie. As with all last jobs, this one isn’t quite what it seems, and Ah Jong finds himself betrayed and hunted by his own colleagues and detective Li Yang, played by Danny Lee. After a while, Jong strikes up a friendship with the detective, and the two of them join forces to defeat the gang hunting for him.
In the remake, the plot is largely the same, though there are some changes. The second version of The Killer flips the gender on Chow Yun-fat’s Ah Jong and presents Nathalie Emmanuel as Zee. It’s a decent replacement. Emmanuel cuts a stylish figure throughout. However, the film’s long standing worry over homoeroticism sees the plot around Jennie, now Jenn, stripped of its admittedly originally light romance and replaced with a vague, hand waving you-remind-me-of-my-dead-sister plot point as the motivation for Zee’s guilt. The failure to just allow Zee and Jenn to be in love creates a series of contortions within the script so that Zee has the ‘right’ motivation for an assassin and the whole thing is a bit tiresome, really. I suspect the choice to do this wasn’t just because of producers, as Woo has been a bit snippy over the interpretation of homoeroticism in the past. Still, you’ll be hard pressed to find anyone who doesn’t think that the true romantic tension in the original The Killer comes from Chow and Lee and not Chow and Yeh. Part of that is, admittedly, due to how little space Sally Yeh is given for her character, but the point remains. Also, y’know, I gotta say, who really cares if they’re gay or not?
I’ve no complaint against the gender flip. I think Nathalie Emmanuel is great. But if the gay romance bothers you, there’s a lot of things you can do so you don’t have to twist yourself around in knots if your script. You can flip Diana Silvers’ role to that of a man, for example.
It sounds like I don’t think much of the new version of The Killer, but that isn’t true. It’s not as good as the original, but that’s mostly due to the end of the film, and the changes there, rather than my complaints with character motivation. Mostly, the new version of The Killer is slick and stylish and the action is a lot better than the original. It should be, in truth. The original The Killer was released in 1989. It’s not surprising to say that it has aged in places. A lot of the original’s action is gunshots and explosions that don’t really do too much but see dudes fly through the air. The best parts of the film involve the mob it at the start, the assassination from a boat, and scenes where Chow and Lee move around Yeh with guns she cannot see. You could argue that the final half of the film’s set pieces are even a little repetitive. Chow Yun-fat still does a great job and is as stylish as ever, but thirty-five years have passed, and no slight to anyone here, you can see it. The remake brings a lot of modern, stylish moments to the act, updating the original mob hit and the final fight in the church nicely, even if it is at the end that the remake fails the most.
The original The Killer is a tragedy. Ah Jong wants to make amends to what he has done to Jennie and takes his last job so that he can afford to fix the vision he damaged. There is a real sense throughout, however, that he will not succeed, or that he will die before she can see again. The film carries the same sense of tragedy that Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï does. It’s the same tragedy that you see again in Jim Jarmusch’s Ghost Dog and Nicolas Winding Refn’s Drive, to name two other films. It is why David Fincher’s The Killer is ultimately not very good. A sense of tragedy, of being somehow caught in a world that ends only one way, is the heartbeat of the best of these films, and it is the beat in the original The Killer, but not the remake. The remake simply doesn’t want to go there and it’s a lesser film because of that choice. The offers hints of darkness in Emmanuel’s Zee, and in fact I think that Emmanuel’s performance echoes Alain Delon’s more than Chow Yun-fat’s did, but Woo never takes it anywhere. Ultimately there’s no cost to doing business, or to living a life of such violence. You know Zee will survive. You know justice will be done.
It’s really this end that separates the two. I actually liked large parts of the remake, and I thought it was interesting to see what changes Woo made and didn’t. I guess I’m like that. I’m always a sucker, even if I rarely think the updates a better. But this kind of remake is really an artist going back and editing an earlier work. It’s fascinating to see what has been done and what hasn’t.
Ben
(Ben Peek is the author of The Godless, Twenty-Six Lies/One Truth, and Dead Americans and Other Stories, amongst others. His next book will be The Red Labyrinth. His short fiction has appeared in Lightspeed, Clarkesworld, Nightmare, Polyphony, and Overland, as well as various Year’s Best Books. He’s the creator of the psychogeography ‘zine The Urban Sprawl Project. He also wrote an autobiographical comic called Nowhere Near Savannah, illustrated by Anna Brown. He lives in Sydney, Australia.)