All of your favourite action movies from the last 30 years would look very different without the impact of John Woo. They’d be far more dull for a start.
The film-maker’s style of explosive, highly choreographed gunfights in films such as The Killer and his 1992 film Hard Boiled coined the term “gun fu” and, combined with his ethically incorruptible protagonists, set the template for the heroic bloodshed subgenre, influencing everything from John Wick to The Matrix to Kill Bill.
In the 1989 film The Killer, Chow Yun-fat plays Ah Jong (or Jeffrey, if you prefer the English dub), a contract killer with a conscience who accidentally blinds a young singer, Jennie (Sally Yeh), while on assignment. Stricken with remorse, Ah Jong decides to retire after one last job, pledging to use the proceeds to help her.
Unfortunately this last contract is for Wong Hoi (Shing Fui-on), a gangster who doesn’t like loose ends, planning to kill Ah Jong rather than trust his professional etiquette. This leads to Ah Jong crossing paths with the maverick detective Li (Danny Lee), after a crazed shootout in which he sports a very fetching fake moustache and once again demonstrates his heart of gold by ferrying an injured child to the hospital.
Conversely, Li is the ultimate rogue cop. When he is lambasted by the chief for causing a hostage to suffer a heart attack, he feels persecuted for doing his job. It’s almost as though he’s not allowed to shoot a bad guy on a crowded tram, surrounded by the general public?
Li sets his sights on Ah Jong and thus the cops, gangsters and righteous assassin are set against each other in a triangle of violence, bringing as much gunfire, high-speed car chases and brooding mutual respect as the streets of Hong Kong can take.
All of Woo’s familiar tricks and motifs are present: there are flapping birds, Mexican standoffs and thugs getting viscerally pulped by gunfire. Stuntmen crash through glass, fire guns while leaping through the air, and barrel roll out of moving vehicles, for no reason other than it looks cool as hell.
The other key ingredient is the chain-smoking Chow, whose mere presence makes everything exponentially cooler. His ability to make callous murder (and smoking for that matter) seem stylish, perfectly demonstrates why he and Woo became one cinema’s greatest partnerships. Did Fred Astaire and Ginger Rogers ever grab a pistol from an upended card table and Swiss-cheese a henchman? Did John Cassavetes and Gena Rowlands ever jump from behind a church pew in slow motion, with a gun in each hand? Did Ingmar Bergman and Liv Ullmann ever shoot a guy in the head from a moving speedboat? Probably not.
The great thing to remember about Woo’s classic era is that these were not obscure, unknown cult movies. They were breakout hits that garnered as many fans abroad as they did domestically. I vividly recall the poster for Woo’s next movie, Hard Boiled, promising that it was “more exciting than a dozen Die Hards”. After discovering that statement was irrefutably true, I scoured the local video shop for anything that contained the two magic words: John Woo.
As recently as 2023, Woo voiced doubts that his classic Hong Kong movies would ever see the light of day again, so it is cause for celebration that The Killer, along with his other Hong Kong films, is available on streamers after years in the licensing wilderness. With this newfound accessibility I hope Woo’s greatest hits garner new generations of fans who will hold these crazy action movies as close to their heart as I do.
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The Killer is available to stream on Kanopy in Australia and on Tubi in Australia and the US. It’s available to rent or buy on Apple TV in Australia and the UK. Find more recommendations of what to stream in Australia here
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