The Killer

The definitive work in John Woo’s oeuvre of ‘hero films’ that established the director as a bona fide auteur, The Killer is a preeminent expression of the noble wuxia tradition of the chivalrous spirit reincarnated in the form of a contemporary action/gangster drama. Chow Yun-fat plays the assassin, John, who has one last hit to carry out when he gets caught in the crossfire of power tussle among gangsters and embarks on a path of no return. A victim of betrayal himself, John forms an unlikely and close bond with Detective ‘Eagle’ Lee (Danny Lee) working on the opposite side of the law. Spectacle-driven and allegorical, the film is transferred into the sphere of aesthetics distinctively Woo’s: the church is as much a place of religious salvation as it is of secular respite for a killer; the allusive presence of doves; emphatic and stylised slow motion that lends gun battles and deaths a sense of lyricism and poetry. Woo’s story telling techniques on ‘honour and friendship’ is a sample to spawn many heroic genre films to follow.