The Killer review – John Woo’s gun-filled melodrama remains a blood-soaked classic

John Woo’s 1989 thriller is a reminder of the director’s habit of hitching the craziest of mayhem to a mile-wide streak of earnest emotionalism and sentimentality; a strong and under-acknowledged part of why his films are so addictive. There’s a lot of bleeding in these violent movies – and bleeding hearts also. With The Killer, Woo somehow became the Douglas Sirk of Hong Kong action cinema, in a gonzo melodrama that borrows from Magnificent Obsession (which Sirk remade from a 1935 film by John Stahl), about the redemption of an assassin falling in love with a woman whose sightlessness he has inadvertently caused.

Chow Yun-fat is Ah Jong, a hired killer who, in the course of whacking someone in a nightclub, accidentally blinds a singer called Jennie (Sally Yeh) by firing too close to her eyes. He becomes stricken with guilt and obsessed with Jennie, hanging out at the club where she continues to sing, now a somewhat morbid and poignant celebrity. Ah Jong talks to Jennie after her shows – without revealing who he is, naturally – and plans one last job to earn enough to pay for her eye operation, taking on the assassination of a bigwig at a Hong Kong carnival. It’s a spectacular set piece, which shows that as, well as influencing Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez, Woo may also have influenced the recent TV version of The Day of the Jackal.

But by taking time to help a terrified and injured little girl in the hit’s aftermath, he infuriates his Triad paymaster, who thinks Ah Jong has compromised the job and refuses to pay. Meanwhile, tough cop Li Ying (Danny Lee), already in trouble for having inadvertantly caused a civilian to die of a heart attack by firing his gun on a crowded tram – an accident analogous to Ah Jong’s own disaster – is on Ah Jong’s trail and comes to sympathise with him.

There are chaotic shootouts and bizarre stretches of comedy – as when blind Jennie finds herself in her own apartment, where Ah Jong and Li are confronting one another in the classic Woo two-gun standoff, and the men have to pretend to be pals so as not to scare her. A gruesome and related moment had me thinking of an exchange from Woody Allen’s Broadway Danny Rose: “Some guy shot him in the eyes” – “He’s blind?” – “Dead” – “Dead, of course, because the bullets go right through.” Ah Jong will also periodically play a mournful harmonica, like a cowboy. The Killer is quite a spectacle and, incidentally, much more pessimistic than Sirk.