I had
learned how to program our VCR when I was 7 years old. So by the mid to late 80’s if something
showed up on the TV guide too late for me to stay up and watch, I’d just set
the timer on the VCR, and tell my parents that they were not allowed to watch
any videos that night. They would roll
their eyes and I would sleep soundly with the knowledge that the latest episode
of “Tales from the Darkside” was being recorded. By the mid-90’s I rarely used the timer on
the VCR anymore. One of the last times that I did was to record this movie I
always heard come up in interviews from my favorite filmmakers at the time,
Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino always mention John Woo’s “The Killer”
as inspiration. When I watched it for
the first time after recording a 1 AM showing of it on Showtime I also could
think of no other word to describe it except as ‘inspiring’.
Chow Yun-fat
(Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon) is Ah Jong a professional killer for hire who
while on a routine job where he takes out almost a dozen guys in minutes and accidently
blinds Jennie (Sally Yea) a nite-club singer who takes a muzzle blast to the
front of her face. He is compelled to
watch over her and is introduced to her when he saves her from a couple of guys
trying to attack her. They start a
relationship as he decides to take one last job to help pay for her eye
surgery. This last job puts Jong in the crosshairs of his own employer and in
the sights of relentless Inspector Li Ying (Danny Lee). When Ying and Jong form a reluctant alliance
it leads to one gunfight after another, leading the way to the final showdown
in a church.
Even now
this movie is awesome as an action movie, every shootout gets bigger and better
all the way to the ultimate bullet-fest at the end. I remember watching it years ago and wondering
how a guy could shoot fifteen times out of a six-shooter, or how he could still
be so accurate while jumping through the air shooting with a gun in each hand? But that soon wore off as the action unfolded,
with the cool slow motion shots, the crazy kills, to the signatures of John Woo, Mexican stand-offs and
the pigeons, yes, the pigeons. There are moments and shots
in “The Killer” that you would see ripped-off for nearly a decade afterwards in American
cinema. The only thing that made me
wince a few times was the dialogue, Woo was writing the script as they were
shooting the film, and it shows. And the
performances are not stellar nor are some of the situations believable even in
the world created here, but it’s easy to forgive when you get action on this
kind of scale in return.
The Blu-ray
is as good as a transfer that there can be, it still looks like bad DVD, but
nothing takes away from the film, it just places it firmly in a certain
time. You have to remember, in the
states in ’89 we just started getting the Die Hard’s and the Lethal Weapon’s
and even though those films started a formula that is still being used today,
we had never seen anything like this. It
would take us years before we would see a movie as ultra-violent and filled
with the ballet-like movements with deadly weapons that make you feel every hit
like this one did. There’s even the epic
slo-mo “hero shot” as the cop and criminal walk side by side to face their
destiny, guns in hand as a building burns behind them. This is without a doubt one of the best
action movies of all time.
--Robert L.
Castillo
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