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Released by: Dragon Dynasty
Released on: 4/2/2010
Director: John Woo
Cast: Chow Yun-Fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh
Year: 1989
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The Movie:
Before John Woo came to the US and made mediocre action films only to return to Hong Kong to make the fantastic Red Cliff, he was the king of bullet ballet. While films like the first two A Better Tomorrow movies and Hardboiled set new standards in action choreography and helped to make Chow Yun-fat an internationally recognized action star whose cool factor was arguably as strong as legends like James Deen and Steve McQueen. The Killer, however, remains his best known and most beloved entry in the Hong Kong new wave of the eighties and if it borrows a lot from Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai, at least Woo puts his own stamp on things.
When the film begins, a hitman named Ah Jong (Chow Yun-Fat) is in the middle of a bloody shoot out with some gangsters in the middle of a nightclub. During the firefight, one of his shots gets so close to the eyes of the singer, Jennie (Sally Yeh), that it blinds her. He feels terrible about this - he may be a killer, but he does have a conscience - and decides to shadow her for a bit, acting as a sort of guardian angel to her. When he saves her from some would be rapists, she starts to take a liking to him and before you know it, love is in the air, though she has no idea that the man she's falling for is the same man who inadvertently took her sight.
While Ah Jong and Jennie are getting to know one another better, a cop named Inspector Li Ying (Dannhy Lee) is hot on Ah Jong's case and closing in on him, bound and determined to take him in dead or alive. Ah Jong, on the other hand, is planning to go legit after making just one more hit. When it all goes wrong and triads aplenty start storming in, Ah Jong and his new cop buddy have to team up to stop the gangsters and hopefully find the money to get Jennie the sight-restoring surgery she needs.
The Killer is just as melodramatic and over the top as it sounds but like the best of the Hong Kong films of its day, it manages to make it all work incredibly well. While it might sound like the film flip flops between a love story and a balls-to-the-wall action movie shoot'em up, the fact is that these two opposite sides of the same coin compliment on another really well. The action and violence brings enough tension and excitement to the table that we're pretty much glued to our seats in awe of the choreography and hyper-stylized violence, while the romantic side of the story allows for some decent character development that eventually succeeds in pulling us in. We get to like the three leads thanks to the humor they share on screen and thanks to the almost playful competition that boils up between Ah Jong and Inspector Li when it comes to wooing the innocent and naí¯ve Jennie.
In typical Woo style, it all comes to a head in a frighteningly good display of bullet ballet and 'gun-fu' stunts that, no matter how many times you see it, never fails to impress. The trademark doves and religious imagery are all here and in fine form, and you can see some of the ideas that Woo would use in Face/Off taking root here. Chow Yun-fat somehow manages to remain consummately cool regardless of how hellish it all gets for him, never losing his temper or showing any more emotion than is absolutely necessary, with Danny Lee's character working almost as well.
Look past the melodramatic elements and take in the big picture and it's easy to see why The Killer remains as enduring and popular as it is. More than twenty years after it was made it's still an amazing containing with some of the best action set pieces ever set on film. A masterpiece in many ways, it's rarely been equaled since.
Video/Audio/Extras:
The Killer debuts on Blu-ray in 1080i AVC encoded 1.85.1 anamorphic widescreen. So aside from the fact that the image is interlaced, how does it shape up? It does offer an upgrade in quality from the DVD releases that are out there, but it's far from perfect. The image is consistent only in its softness and detail suffers because of this. Yes, you will notice more texture and more lifelike skin tones when you compare it to standard definition but you'll also notice spots where waxiness is noticeable in spots. There isn't a whole lot of print damage to complain about but some smearing is noticeable in spots. Colors sometimes look very flat and monotone at times, and clipping and aliasing are both noticeable in scenes where there is fast motion near bright lights (the shoot out in the church being a prime example). So while this does look better than the standard DVDs that are out there, by high definition standards it isn't a very impressive transfer at all, in fact, it's pretty disappointing. The film definitely deserves better as this transfer is messy and careless.
The two soundtracks offered on this disc are a Cantonese Dolby Digital 2.0 Stereo track and an English dubbed Dolby Digital 5.1 Surround Sound track. Puzzlingly, no lossless audio option is offered, though subtitles are provided in English and Spanish. The Cantonese track definitely suits the film much better than the goofy English dubbing but both tracks generally sound fine. Obviously the 5.1 mix spreads things out more than the 2.0 mix does, but both mixes provide good channel separation and properly balanced levels. A DTS-HD or Dolby TrueHD offering would have been really nice to see and probably would have really made the action sequences come to life, but what's here sounds okay at least.
The best of the extras on this disc is a twenty-four minute interview with John Woo in which he speaks about his work and about this film in particular, placing it into context alongside some of his other pictures and drawing some interesting comparisons to those other pictures. He also speaks about the people he collaborated with on the film. There are also two Q&A sessions with Woo included here which were conducted at American Cinematheque screenings of his pictures. He answers questions about The Killer for a good thirty-five minutes and then answers questions about Hardboiled for twelve minutes or so. He covers some of the same ground as he does in the interview but there's enough original material in both supplements that they prove to be pretty interesting.
Rounding out the extras are a pair of trailers for the feature, trailers for a few other John Woo films, a handful of deleted and extended scenes, animated menus and chapter stops. All of the extras are presented in standard definition. It would have been nice to see a commentary on this disc (the Winstar release from years back had a really solid one but it wasn't ported over to this release, neither was the Criterion commentary from Woo and producer Terrance Chang).
The Final Word:
The Killer remains one of the standards by which all over action films are judged, a ridiculously violent and beautifully choreographed slice of melodramatic carnage and mayhem set to a great rhythm and played with loads of style. Dragon Dynasty's Blu-ray is nothing to write home about in terms of audio and video quality, and even if it is the best home video version currently available, the film's fans know that it deserves better. Until that happens, however, this release will have to do.