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.
