The Killer

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 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.

I enjoy a good straigh forward action movie but this was just complete nonsense. When you have a movie with such a dumb plot you need lots of good action to keep the audience from thinking about the stupid plot too much. This movie barely has any action and the action it has is mediocre at best. The acting is also mediocre at best. I liked the main actress, she had a good style to her and the black cop as well. The few scenes they had together where some of the best. This definitely had potential, there is some great camera work and stuns here and there but is just too little to keep your entretain.

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.

Why John this is just not neccesary, this is simply an excuse to put two charismatic actors kicking assess, this is not a neccesary remake my guy, it's just like the original but without the essentially of that film, you should make a remake one of your American Van Damme movies, those are not good

The crow and now this one, stop remaking solid and classic movies please, you people should remade something like Waterworld or the Travolta alien movie, try to improve bad movies instead of remaking good ones, this is not a good remake and its feels forced and weird sometimes, you can do better ok guys.