Review of Killer, The (Special Collector´s Edition)

Introduction

Before he was bluffing his way through zillion-dollar pap like ‘Windtalkers’, John Woo was making pap on a considerably more modest scale in his native Hong Kong. His collaborations with legendary Hong Kong producer Tsui Hark (a talented action-maestro himself) proved so successful in the ‘Better Tomorrow’ series that they charged head-long into another vehicle for rising star Chow Yun-Fat, a charismatic actor weaned on a diet of comedies and carnage. The resulting film, ‘The Killer’ proved to be a less than pleasant collaboration for Woo and Hark but the film became a huge hit in the East and largely inspired the cult of gunplay movies in the West.

The plot is quintessential Woo before it became self-parody: a conscience-wracked hitman (Yun-Fat), endeavors to change his immoral ways by saving the eyesight of a lounge singer (Sally Yeh) whom he accidentally blinded during the opening blood-bath. However, the road to belated redemption doesn’t run smoothly when you’ve got a maverick cop on your case (Danny Lee in pretty-boy loose-canon mode)and at least 100 prancing extras to eviscerate.

Video

Well, considering that previous releases of ‘The Killer’ have either been of a quality no better than a bad bootleg, heavily censored, or both, this Hong Kong Legends re-release doesn’t have to do a great deal to impress. It succeeds somewhat, with good definition and surprisingly lacking in terms of print damage. However, the colours and sharpness of the print seem a little worn out, giving the visuals a duller, more saturated quality than was intended.

Audio

Firstly, there’s a choice between the original Chinese language track and an English dub. It should be noted that whichever one you chose, subtitles or dub, the dialogue shares almost nothing in common. Things are slightly more nonsensical in the dub, which is amusing for all the wrong reasons as well as all the right ones and doesn’t seem to have been screened at all by anyone who actually speaks English as it categorically fails to make the slightest bit of sense. The subtitles are marginally less incoherent, but for me a film like this isn’t quite the same without the most atrocious dubbing mankind can offer. Both are presented in actually quite poor 5.1 tracks which haven’t been terribly well mastered for this edition, with a lot of sounds muted and a generally murky palette of explosions, gunfire and general aural mayhem.

Features

Although it suffers from a notable lack of involvement from either Chow Yun-Fat or John Woo, the extras on this release aren’t totally bereft of interest: Interviews with cinematographer Peter Pau and actors Sally Yeh and Kenneth Tsang are more informative than you might think, although some of their comments clash rather starkly with comments made by Bey Logan on his well-informed and not too rapturous commentary track. Finally we have some ‘rare’ deleted scenes that add plenty of redundancy to the plot and a highly entertaining gallery of trailers for ‘The Killer’ and other Hong Kong Legends releases.

Conclusion

Archetypal hot-handed bullet-ballet that doesn’t quite manage to reach the dizzying spectacle of ‘Hard Boiled’ in terms of destructive delirium, but could never be said to be coasting through its endless barrage of rigorous action sequences. However, Woo as scriptwriter, (somewhat unsurprisingly) doesn’t devote the same attention to his dialogue and characterization that he does to his fetishistic action scenes, making do with cod-philosophizing, outrageous homoerotic overtones and stifling sentimentality. If it’s ludicrous and alienating in isolated doses, the endless maelstrom of melodramatic excess builds to a hysterically overwrought whole, wildly theatrical way beyond the sum of the separate elements.

The intoxicating preposterousness of the production, which blends idiotic slapstick, ultraviolent gore, hectic action and sentimental drama simply could not function without a generous selection of perfectly bland performances: Lee is as good gazing mournfully at Yun-Fat and whispering sweet-nothings as he is chasing scummy triads down the streets of Hong Kong. And newcomer Yeh is on form portraying some quite staggering somnambulistic blind acting with all the skill and subtlety you’d expect. Yun-Fat’s presence of course, dominates. Not satisfied with simply blasting a bad guy’s guts out, he turns the act of murder into a majestic display of graceful poise, rendering the bloody consequences that result something of a foot-note.

Naturally, the grandest caterwauling massacre is saved for the church-set finale, (although I happen to prefer the sleek, angular chaos of an attack on a sea-side home) by which point Woo has pushed the film so far beyond its elegiac posturing into some dimension of pure aesthetic exultation. We’d have to wait a couple more years for the truly insane limits of his peculiar visual mastery to arrive but this proves a beguiling and memorable appetizer.