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Upon watching the initial trailer for Peacock’s new original actioner, The Killer which sees Hong Kong action filmmaking maestro John Woo remaking his own iconic thriller which starred a young Chow Yun-Fat, my first thought was that this is not going to fly with hardcore action cinema fans and John Woo faithful. Even though Woo directed it, the trailer doesn’t look like it will be up to the same standards as the original and Fat was just so damn cool that I don’t thing new star Nathalie Emmanuel (Fast Saga) will be able to fill his shoes. No offense to her at all as it looks like she does a great job, but this movie should have been called something else altogether. Sure, there’s iconic Woo moments featured prominently in the footage, but this one is going to be a hard sell to the fans out there. At any rate, the trailer is now live for you to make your own judgements over.
Zee is a mysterious and infamous assassin known, and feared, in the Parisian underworld as the Queen of the Dead. But when Zee refuses to kill a blinded young woman in a Paris nightclub, the decision will disintegrate her alliances, attract the attention of a savvy police investigator, and plunge her into a sinister criminal conspiracy that will set her on a collision course with her own past.
Woo helms the film with a cast that includes Nathalie Emmanuel as the steely eyed assassin Zee who has a change of heart when she’s given a target to eliminate just like Fat did in the original. She’s pursued by a law enforcement investigator named Sy played fitting enough by the actor named Omar Sy (how original) who takes over the role that Danny Lee made famous. Diana Silvers also stars as the blind woman Zee is ordered to kill by her handler Finn (Sam Worthington) which sets bloody events into motion as millions of bullets are spent in the service of action cinema entertainment.
There is a plethora of bloody balletic Woo fan service to be had including ample shots of Emmanuel looking cool and bad ass as she leaps into the air firing away with double fisted firepower and there’s also a pretty rad shot of her performing a scissors hold on an opponent as she blasts away at other gunmen looking completely at peace with herself. We also get the iconic shot of Zee and Sy pointing guns at each other only to erupt into chaos as they fire into opposite directions at charging baddies. The action design is clearly there but will it satisfy in the long run. My guess is that this remake won’t last as long as Woo’s initial movie but only time and fan service will tell.
All I know is the finale better include henchmen wearing all white like in the first film so we can see the red blood squibs explode off of them in grand spectacle. I do like how Woo incorporates the same style of church location for what will ultimately be the finale, but we also get some female-on-female fisticuffs as it looks like Zee takes on another woman assassin. On the surface, it looks like a hyper-kinetic good time, but it probably won’t be up to par and why we needed this is beyond me.
August 23rd is the date as Peacock will release the R rated actioner on their platform so fans will surely line up to see if Woo still has it in him or if this one will suffer a horrible fate at the hands of the iconic original. Make no mistake, some serious firepower will erupt during the film’s running time and stunt pros will fall like dominos from start to finish. I’ll be watching…what the hell.
