Jeff's Reviews

Thoughts on every movie I've ever seen.

The Killer (1989)

Directed by John Woo

Starring Yun-Fat Chow, Danny Lee, Sally Yeh, Kong Chu

Author

So violent it’s funny. The action just keeps on coming. A few unbelievably crazy shootout scenes. The body count had to be a record. They shot people five times in the stomach, chest, and head before they were convinced they were dead. Predictably, the characters found themselves running out of ammo.

The story is almost touching, but the non-action parts move too fast. The pacing is all screwed up, and the story (although a pretty good one) isn’t told too well. It’s a wee bit confusing at times, and the characters aren’t really developed too well. The girl slowly losing her sight is kind of a neat metaphor for something else that I still haven’t figured out. It’s neat how the story starts and ends at the church (the same place), a technique that I really like. As in Heat, the two main characters are enemies but come to respect each other in the end. I think that they could have wrapped up the story a bit more at the end, though. It would have been really neat if they both lived on as a blind couple.

A neat scene of bullets being pulled out of a guys back with pliers, copied in Terminator 2: Judgment Day, another connection between Woo and Cameron. It was also cool when the hero took off his tie and tied it around his arm, even though I don’t know what the hell he was doing. A few neat effects, like when the hero disappears behind a man who walks across the screen in the foreground. A few dumb effects, like the freeze frames. They made me think the movie was over. The same cheesy 80’s music that seems to plague modern foreign action films. Why do other countries lag behind?

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