the killer: SCREENING INTRODUCTION BY John MAGUIRE
John Woo’s *The Killer was one of my first experiences with the cinema of Hong Kong, rented on a faded VHS from much-missed Metropolis Video library on Baggot Street, where I spent many a Friday night in my early 20s, in the early 1990s. In the days before the internet decided things for us, the only way to find out if you liked something was to actually watch it, if you could get your hands on it.
We'd watch everything we rented a couple of times, to get the value out of it, and I can still recall the thrill of the first time I watched this film and can visualise my trembling finger reaching for the rewind button to immediately watch it again. It was a shot of pure adrenaline.
This is the film that got me hooked into Asian cinema. I immersed myself in Woo’s gangster movies – A Better Tomorrow I and II, Bullet In The Head, and Hard Boiled – they all came and went from Metropolis or Laser Video, and led to other exemplars from the region at the time, many of which – as this film does – bore the imprimatur of producer Tsui Hark, who favoured sophisticated visuals and ever more furious editing, or Ringo Lam, who was a bit grimier but no less frantic.
The other thing this tranche of films have in common is that they nearly always starred Chow Yun-Fat, who became a star among stars in Hong Kong but whose grace and athleticism, his charisma and energy, was – and still is – an astonishing thing to see. Chow plays Ah Jong, a super-cool professional assassin for the Triads who wants to retire but during a shootout accidentally injures the eyes of nightclub singer Jennie (Sally Yeh) and so – being a man of honour – takes on one last job to pay for her treatment. He ends up caught in the middle of a Triad power struggle and a tightening police investigation, personified by detective Li Ying (Danny Lee).
In the normal run of events, the cop and the killer would represent the polarity of good and evil, but Woo – who also scripted – creates instead a moral spectrum. Jong and Ying develop an unlikely bond – a bromance, you might say – as they experience a series of life-and-death encounters. There is chivalry at play here, an expression of the Wuxia tradition of noble heroism, filtered through Woo’s admiration for Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai and Douglas Sirk’s Magnificent Obsession.
It might be impossible, from the perspective of 2026, to understand why these films felt so new; however much they relied on reworking and repurposing elements of Hollywood and European cinema. If they owed a debt though, Hollywood and Europe were in turn repaid many times over. In the international landscape of action cinema, The Killer was a tectonic shift. It wasn’t just a gripping gangster story, it fundamentally rewrote the visual language of the genre, profoundly influencing many Asian and western filmmakers. Tarantino has to be mentioned here, as do the Wachowskis, or any filmmaker anywhere in the world who wanted to shoot two guys firing guns at each other.
This is the aesthetic as spectacle, it is movement as action, and that action speaks more than words in how it expresses the character’s inner turmoil. In The Killer, violence is a form of communication, brutal, bloody, but universally translatable; a lingua franca. Each passage of the choreography is, like a painter or a musician, suggested in just a few masterful strokes. Woo’s stylised slow motion isn’t just a cool camera trick that allows us to revel in that brutality but a visual flourish that lends the gun battles and death scenes a sense of poetry. In the intervening 40 years, Woo’s slow motion – “speed ramping”, as a cinematographer would call it – has been parodied to death but to see it here in its raw form is an indication of a filmmaker in full command of his craft, shifting the rhythms and tempos of the action to create the effect he desires. A gunfight here isn't just a conflict; it’s an exquisitely choreographed dance that is ambitious and lyrical and full of meaning.
The core of The Killer is an operatic exploration of honour and brotherhood in a chaotic and collapsing world, full of corruption and evil. Jong and Ying – who we often see doubled, sitting back to back or holding guns to one another's heads – are mirrors of one another, and they recognise themselves in what they see reflected. In the world of The Killer, a man is seen and understood by his equal, and it doesn’t matter what side of the law they stand on. These two live by a moral code that their peers don’t understand, much less follow, and the film suggests that those shared values are much more important than right or wrong, and that following their conscience is what ultimately leads to their redemptions.
Redemption is the recurring theme in Woo’s cinema, which uses religious iconography not merely as window dressing but to underline inquiries of faith, sin, guilt, and the human soul. You don’t get this with Zach Snyder or Michael Bay. Woo’s parents, who were Protestant Christians, had been persecuted for their beliefs in Mao-era China and had fled to Hong Kong when he was five. As a youngster, Woo thought for a while that he had a vocation to take holy orders but instead got a job as a script supervisor at Cathay Studios in 1969, and then became an assistant director at the famous Shaw Studios before making his debut feature with The Young Dragons in 1974.
The frequent use of a church as a sanctuary, and a location for an inciting incident and a final showdown is not accidental – it’s Jong’s desire to cleanse his soul despite his guilt, which his central motivation – to atone for blinding Jennie is a literal attempt to bring light to a world he is responsible for darkening. The white doves speak for themselves. There’s nothing explicitly didactic in The Killer, but there’s also really no way to watch it without considering the mystery of morality, the nature of right and wrong, the cost of violence and the value of a good act in a cruel world. We become invested in Jong and Ying’s desire to change their lives, and their struggle to escape their troubled worlds with their souls intact needs little translation.
By the time The Killer was released, Woo was an experienced filmmaker with a near two decade career, having previously made everything from adaptations of Cantonese opera to Kung-Fu kick abouts, mild-mannered comedies and gooey romances. He was in fact considered a comedy specialist, but the laughs had dried up and audiences had deserted him. In 1986, he directed A Better Tomorrow which was a smash hit and revealed him as a superb director of action, with an ability to bring thematic heft and sweeping grandeur to what was a fairly disreputable genre; triad gangster shoot-em-ups.
Even with the presence of Chow Yun-Fat (who had made two previous films with Woo and was immediately coming off the enormous success of God of Gamblers, an action comedy directed by the prolific Wong Jing), The Killer was an inexplicable flop with home audiences in Hong Kong. But it was a critical sensation internationally, and was embraced wherever it was shown. Audiences came for the half-dozen massacres in which sleazy gangsters are blasted to kingdom come but stayed for the extraordinary spasms of sentiment and romance, the soul-searching and the heady, distant mood of abstraction. Around the time I got to see it in the early 1990s, it had already become Woo’s stepping-stone into Hollywood and his first English-language film, Hard Target. His career has had ups and downs since – for every Face/Off there’s a Silent Night - but his achievement with The Killer was to show that action has no borders.
For many years, my flickering VHS or a non-anamorphic letterbox DVD was the only way to watch The Killer. The Hong Kong film industry, like many national cinemas, had an issue with film preservation, treating genre films as disposable products. Preservation was not taken seriously, and even cultural milestones like The Killer were neglected. Sorting out ownership and distribution rights was another challenge for many films. Now, we get to see it in glorious remastered 4K, the prospect of which already has my rewind finger twitching.
John Maguire, film critic and feature writer for the Business Post newspaper, broadcaster and journalist.
*The Killer (Die Xue Shuang Xiong; dir. John Woo, 1989)
(19 March 2026, screening as part of the 10th EAFFI 2026)