The Killer

Hard to believe this is John Woo movie. Perhaps he doesn't care much more about the script and it's all about style and filming and little else. Every cliche is pulled out of movie history, as our hardened killer has mercy on the innocent girl. It was put together to also present the battle of the non non binary lesbians. It's not meant to be a slight on lgbtq people, there was just no reason to have them in there and it is never explained. Some nonsense about the beating of Sam worthington's heart, in his attempt to do an Irish accent.

All the good reviews here are fake. This is a shell of what good films used to be. You seen it all before and just much better done.

It's not the worst thing you can watch. It has its moments. Every once in a while it wakes up and remembers it's an action movie. The rest of the time it's down wallowing in a rut of character moments that try too hard to convince us that we should care about these characters. Sam Worthington does a terrible Irish accent despite his character having no reason to be Irish.

The action is fun, everything else is boring because despite the effort it's hard to care about these characters and what they're going through. It's Jon Woo without the charm. It can't shake off the wrapper of NBC TV production despite desperately trying.

I had to stop after 50min where I couldn't take it anymore, I mean it might be for someone but not for me.

John Woo has a style and I respect that! However I'm not sure if I would still have stomach for that in 2024, nearly 30 years after Faceoff.

You might ask how about the story then? Enough to know that a Killer with misplaced conscious caused a lot of civilians to die to avoid one particular civilian to die because she was against killing civilians. I know it's stupid. But that's the main theme, at least up until I said enough is enough. The plot has so many wholes and it looks so fake that even popular faces couldn't save it for me.

Do not waste your precious life with this movie, Mr Woo, please grow up.

I don't know how many action clichés John Woo made and then piled up during his carrier, but I guess a lot. This picture is really like mocking himself. Probably, rather than maybe, he is. Well, it is a remake of his own film, once considered pioneer of modern action movies, but it does nothing original at all. Rather, it delivers basically the same but with much less intensity, commitment and flair. The soul of the original is absent. There is no fire in it, just ember - to say the least. The characters are good but apparently most of them are restricted, blocked even, to show raw emotions (with the exception of Cantona). It is a weak remake, as they usually are.

I realise that John Woo is an iconic director, mainly because of his run of funky HK triad gunslinger movies, but whoever put this remake together skimped on the screenwriting, and the script. The direction is ok, but with the nagging feeling that the hourly rate there was also well shy of inspirational.

Every cliched character and trite line of dialogue feels disconnected, existing in isolation, awaiting their brief memetime on Tik Tok and Youtube.

Even the action felt kinda perfunctory, like a cheap sequel filmed in a hurry by an inferior production crew, with no sense of pride in their accomplishments. "Two more flash-cut car chases, an MMA ruck in a public space, a slow-mo bullet time shootout, and we're done, chaps".

What it resembles, more than anything, is a low-budget 80s Eurocrime actioner, with a mismatched Euro-cast, and a script straight out of Babelfish, tarted up in post to look vaguely modern. Unfortunately, it ends up looking like a badly animated storyboard.