The power of the gun is terrible and beautiful in equal measure in the work of John Woo, the inarguable alpha dog of the Hong Kong heroic bloodshed genre, whose unrelentingly and entertainingly violent streak in the late 80s and early 90s defined an era of melodramatic excess in action cinema.
An infinite ammo clip here, a slow-motion dove there, symbols of devotion and faith scattered everywhere, there's never been a cliche Woo didn't define and then transcend, all in the name of high-calibre visceral emotion.
Plum in the middle of his Hong Kong golden era (sandwiched between two A Better Tomorrow films and the furious double-header of Bullet in the Head and Hard Boiled) is The Killer, perhaps the most achingly romantic he has made to date, now restored in stunning crimson-hued 4K as part of Shout! Studios and Arrow Video's collaboration to bring the great bullet-ballet maestro's cinema to a new generation of theatre-goers.
As is tradition for Woo, Chow Yun-Fat leads as a tortured death-bringer with a complicated moral compass. This time, Chow's Ah Chong is a hitman with a heart, whose contract killings see him run in with dodgy triad types, often in bustling public places. Unfortunate then, that his latest job is set in his favorite jazz lounge, and a rogue close-range muzzle flash results in blinding the apple of his eye, Jennie (Sally Yeh).
Wracked with guilt and doing his best to make amends for Jennie's worsening vision, he has one last window to make enough dough for her cornea treatment. Things hardly go to plan, however, when the assassination of a high-profile politician puts a target on his back from both his nefarious employers (led by Shing Fui-on's Uncle Hoi) and the similarly reckless cop on his tail, Detective Li (Danny Lee Sau-Yin).
The great pleasure of The Killer comes not only from its glorious action spectacle, but in the live-wire relationships at its centre. Woo is no stranger to depicting friendships on either side of the law; he would later mount a biblically-homoerotic smoulder-fest between Chow and Tony Leung Chiu-Wai in Hard Boiled, and there's no forgetting the absurdly intertwined relationship between Castor Troy and Sean Archer in Face/Off.
Yet he likely never made a more Shakespearean bond than Chow and Lee have here, both united by the collateral damage their weapons have inflicted on the innocent in pursuit of their man. Each sees in one another a small defection from their roles, a gap in the armor that lets them know they, yes, are not so different, he and he.
Despite the well-worn archetypes Woo deals in, there's never a point where the drama feels hackneyed or cheap, thanks in great part to the throbbing shame motivating its leads, knowing deep down that the instruments of death held in their hands are part of their very being, and the decision to keep using them will spell terrible consequences for themselves and everyone around them. The great tragedy of the film is that it takes them just a second too long to fully realise it.
Rekindling their combative brotherly chemistry from Ringo Lam Ling-tung's City on Fire, Chow and Lee are delightful, oozing charisma and sensual danger throughout, but especially when they're at the end of one another's pistols. Woo gives them sufficient room to strut their stuff too; one late-in-the-game slow-mo walking shot is so hilariously ripe that you can almost smell it, defining the subsequent decade of action movies' obsession with making its morally dubious protagonists the coolest guys who ever lived.
Faring less well is Sally Yeh's Jennie, whose victimhood defines her entire being, and the film consistently uses her new disability as a haunting reminder of Ah Chong's bad decisions. This wouldn't quite be as big an issue if it were backed up by a character that was written with any resilience, but Jennie is characterised as something far beyond a damsel-in-distress, a hardly-there cipher who exists more effectively as a human shield than she does a human being.
However, Yeh does do what she can with an extremely thin role, and there are moments of significant beauty between her and Chow; a series of match-cuts between their respective gazes early on in the film is so swooningly romantic that it echoes straight through to the film's final scene with devastatingly bleak extremity.
In the end, it's that very bleakness that makes The Killer a tremendously forceful experience. Woo's knack for mounting engaging action sequences holds far more emotional weight here than it does in (most of) his other pictures -- Bullet in the Head remains the toughest of the bunch -- because the bloodletting actually means something.
Sure, there's a standard amount of heavies getting mown down by Uzi-fire (mostly dressed in pristine white tracksuits to really make those blood squibs pop), but there's less glee in the mutilation of the human form than usual here, rooting the brutality of a bullet tearing through flesh in terrible, irreversible consequences. The fact that the film seems to end one scene too soon is exactly how it leaves you, not necessarily wanting more, but wanting something other than the ruinous sadness its characters are left to wallow in until the end of their days.
Infinite kudos has to go to Shout! and Arrow for so painstakingly restoring this seminal work alongside the other Golden Princess films John Woo made, and there's so much visual flair to get lost in with this new transfer. The balance of woozy reds and eye-sorching whites is as luscious as it is sickly, drawing out the rich, decadent colour palette and standing it in stark, effective contrast to his other work (Shout!'s restoration of Hard Boiled is an inky, ice-cool swim in cobalt blues and greys).
Obviously best seen with a crowd, there's something truly special about Woo's work being played so big once again, having been relegated to crusty out-of-print DVDs and bootleg Blu-rays in the western hemisphere. The ecstatic excitement and crushing pain of The Killer is a big-screen experience to cherish, sending you soaring high as a dove before cutting you down mid-flight in a barrage of bullets.
The Killer screens in U.S. movie theaters on Sunday, April 5; Monday, April 6; and Wednesday, April 8, via Shout! Studios, Hong Kong Cinema Classics, and GKIDS. Visit their official site for locations and showtimes.