- If you enjoyed Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai but found yourself wishing that it been overstuffed with gunfights and car chases, then John Woo's The Killer may be for you. It's funny that the two films share so many widely acknowledged elements of plot and characterization because their directors could not be more dissimilar. Melville's intriguing minimalism forms a stark contrast with Woo's exhausting melodrama. The sum of Melville's filmography lacks the action of The Killer's first half hour. Even Melville's cool, washed-out blue color palette has been replaced by Woo's bright electric blues. Maybe the only thing that the two directors really share in common is their conspicuous affection for American cinema.
- In The Killer, the hitman's name is Jeffrey (instead of Jef), and he's played by Chow Yun-Fat (instead of Alain Delon). Jeffrey falls in love with a piano player named Jennie (Sally Yeh), whom he accidentally blinds in a botched assassination. Naturally, Jeffrey accepts one last assignment to pay for Jennie's eye surgery, but his employer (Shing Fui-on) double-crosses him just as a dedicated police officer (Danny Lee) begins nipping at his heels. Even Jeffrey's friend and fellow assassin (Chu Kong) doesn't know whether to kill or to help Jeffrey, actually trying out both approaches before the film is through.
- The best parts of The Killer put Chow Yun-Fat's hangdog facial expressions to good use in recapturing the disillusioned ennui that defined both American film noir and Melville's French antecedents. The film also contains many remarkably kinetic gunfights that rightly earned John Woo his reputation as a talented action director. That said, there aren't nearly enough interesting ideas to support the film's runtime, and its plot quickly devolves into a repeating sequence of two men pointing guns at each other, then smiling at each other, and finally teaming up to shoot a seemingly endless supply of other men. Jennie's blindness quickly becomes a vehicle for accidental comedy in a manner remniscent of Wait Until Dark. Unless you're a really big fan of gunfights, you're much better off watching any film that influenced this one before watching The Killer itself.
- There is a hospital sign that says "Scared Heart" instead of Sacred Heart.
- The particular subtitles that I used had the two main characters calling each other "Mickey Mouse" and "Dumbo," which was a distracting choice.
