Until this remake of The Killer, it respected John Woo’s signature in action films. His stories and images always seemed overly dramatic to me, but they worked. Forty years later, not so much. The cheesiness is not sustained by a shred of a story that is also made worse by the lack of physical ability of its stars to convince us in the action scenes: Nathalie Emmanuel (from Game of Thrones) and Omar Sy (from Lupin).

The behind-the-scenes stories of The Killer are infinitely more interesting than those of the film. First, it is an original film by Woo back in the 1970s and became a project that circulated in Hollywood since 1989, originally thought for Richard Gere and Nicolas Cage. So, how did we get to Nathalie and Omar thirty-five years later? It doesn’t matter, we know that Nathalie joined after the delay in filming lost Lupita Nyong’o. To ‘update’ the original story, Zee became a woman, but it didn’t work very well.

Here we have the mysterious assassin Zee (Emmanuel) who works for an organization led by Finn (Sam Worthington) who hesitates to complete the job because he “only kills bad people” and one of the targets is Jenn (Diana Silvers) who she instinctively realizes is a good person. Pressured to eliminate the witness of the crime, she tries to keep Jenn alive and has to escape from a cunning Paris police officer, Sey (Sy), who is on her trail.

In the cat and mouse game there are more twists and turns – none that really involve us – all to justify what should be an incredible action scene, we see the duo navigate through the beautiful images of Paris. Although she sympathizes with Nathalie Emmanuel, she is the weak link and destroys the already precarious chance of the film working.

As Roger Ebert puts it, The Killer feels “spiceless” and “drained of passion.” “There’s nothing to care about here in terms of plot, while additions like a few flashbacks to Zee’s origin story feel half-hearted and cheap,” he describes perfectly. And I agree with him on one more assessment: it’s a “watchable but almost instantly forgettable” movie. A far cry from what a John Woo film once was.

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