 |
| Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee in The Killer |
Cast: Chow Yun-fat, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Kenneth Tsang, Chu Kong, Shing Fui-on, Ricky Yi Fan-wai, Barry Wong. Screenplay: John Woo. Cinematography: Peter Pau, Wong Wing-Hang. Art direction: Luk Man-Wah. Film editing: Fan Kung-Ming. Music: Lowell Lo.
The rhythmic violence of John Woo's The Killer obliterates thought, turning what could be a study of motives and morals into a ballet of blood-letting that exhilarates with its inherent absurdity. It's a film of overkill, in which dispatching an adversary is never accomplished with one shot but with four or six or eight. No one falls dead, they recoil and squirm. Opponents come in waves, never stepping into the fray but rushing and swooping. If you closed your eyes (not that that's possible), the gunshots could be a drum solo punctuated by grunts and squeals. It is, in short, action movie making at its purest and best. It helps that the actors playing the film's antagonistic protagonists, Ah Jong (Chow Yun-fat) and Li Ying (Danny Lee), possess an innate charisma, so that we're fooled into thinking of them as human beings when in fact they're just plot devices to provoke action. Woo wants us to reflect on their motives and morals, and he gives them speeches to explore those, but then the action starts again and it's just a movie. But what a movie, a torrent of bullets and doves, of religion and gore, of mayhem and honor.
