Stream It Or Skip It: ‘The Killer’ on Peacock, John Woo’s new take on his own film, now with Nathalie Emmanuel 

The Killer, directed by John Woo, is now streaming on Peacock. It is not The Killer, directed by David Fincher, that is streaming on Netflix. But it is also not The Killer, directed by John Woo, that the Hong Kong-based filmmaker made in 1989, the one he also wrote and which became a bullet ballet classic, even if it shares component parts with Woo’s first run on this material. Woo’s new Killer is in love with Paris, and the way Nathalie Emmanuel, replacing the original’s Chow Yun-fat as the title assassin, pirouettes past flying bullets in the City of Light. Zee (Emmanuel) has always been the best. But when a job goes bad, she’s suddenly in the middle of a struggle between the Parisian underworld, the cops, and the people she thought she could trust. The Killer also stars Omar Sy of Lupin fame, and Sam Worthington, who goes all-in on a totally bizarre Irish accent.

THE KILLER (2024): STREAM IT OR SKIP IT? 

The Gist: Reimagining his own The Killer, it’s not long before John Woo’s new Killer finds itself in a brokedown church where cooing pigeons appear before stained glass. The religious imagery is thick – a de-consecrated holy place, emptied, like the soul of our highly-trained hitwoman Zee (Emmanuel). Infamous in Paris for her skill and mystery, Zee takes jobs from Finn (Worthington), and always with the same caveat. “Do they deserve this death?” We assume all of her targets over a 15-year career met that criteria, and she assumes the sinister silk-shirted bunch in a private party room do, too. Oh, and don’t bother frisking her. The weapons are there, but you can’t see them. Until she goes into action. And in the aftermath, cops like Sey (Sy) are left to wonder how someone murdered a bunch of dudes with a samurai sword and departed the club unnoticed.

Zee and Finn’s relationship is built on a kind of trust, but her hard-won independence is what truly guides her, and that serves her well once everything goes to shit. Jenn (Diana Silvers), a singer in the nightclub, isn’t entirely innocent of the mayhem that unfolded around her, but she’s more innocent than most, and Zee feels terrible for partially blinding her during the hit. In her, Zee sees the hope for a good life that left her a long time ago. But all Finn sees Jenn as is a liability, because the singer is a link to $350 million worth of heroin that’s in the wind, with various criminal interests trying to get at it. (Sӓid Taghmaoui is enjoyable in his brief scenes as a Saudi prince mixed up in the drug plot.) And while Sey deflects internal pressure from his police department higher-ups, he also grows more intrigued with Zee. In the streets, she’s known as the Queen of the Dead. But Sey sees how Zee’s moral code is not so different from his own.

The more ridiculous Sam Worthington’s Irish brogue becomes in The Killer, the more fraught the situation in Paris becomes, and pretty soon everyone’s gunning for the unlikely duo of Zee and Sey. Cue them back to back, spinning as they fire revolvers and nine millimeters at their attackers. Find them getting philosophical in a few of the film’s quieter moments. (“You would be me” – if Sey wasn’t a cop – “and I would be you.”) And follow them back to that abandoned church, where its old graveyard is sure to serve up quite a few new resting places. It’s only when Zee lights a votive for your soul that you realize you’ve lost. 

What Movies Will It Remind You Of? In The Killer, when Nathalie Emmanuel’s Zee says things like “If you live by a code, you’re honorable; shame isn’t an issue,” her hitwoman would seem to share a kinship with Michael Fassbender’s process-driven assassin in David Fincher’s The Killer. And there’s nothing wrong with enjoying the self-referentialism of Woo’s film, like the motorcycle theatrics it shares with Mission: Impossible II, or Zee and Sey manifesting the ethos of Face/Off , representing two faces on two sides of the same violent coin. 

Performance Worth Watching: In time, Emmanuel and Omar Sey establish a real nice chemistry in The Killer, enough that we’d like to see them together in a sequel. (The Killer-er?) But we’ll highlight Tchéky Karo here, not because he was in Michael Bay’s bullet ballet tribute Bad Boys, but because the always reliable Karo plays a studied, wise tailor who both watches over Zee and creates for her garments with integrated tactical features, John Wick-style.    

Memorable Dialogue: La légende de la Reine des Morts. “The Queen of the Dead,” Sey’s cop buddy says. “A woman killer so elusive, so skilled, no one has ever seen her.” 

Sex and Skin: Nothing here. When she’s not carrying out contract killings, Zee is too busy being content to share her life with a goldfish named Y and her beloved Le Monde crosswords.

Our Take: You see it a lot in action films nowadays, the dynamic takedown of an adversary using a full-body leg-wrapping wrestling throw. But because John Woo is John Woo and he’s an innovator in this space, you see it done differently and better in The Killer. There are lots of familiar pieces in this film, things you can point to like Leo in the meme and say “Woo-ism!”. And yeah, some of those pieces don’t really land. Some of the action stuff can feel a little awkward, some of the chases are too long, that sort of thing. But the flaws are minor in the face of what’s fantastic. Nathalie Emmanuel is cool and cold-blooded as Zee, the contract killer. But she finds her heart, too, and lets that sensitivity simmer alongside all of the havoc. Omar Sy is funny as Sey, like when he does his awkward best to emulate one of Zee’s more balletic escape moves, but Sy also builds a nice rapport with Emmanuel that enlivens the stretches in The Killer where killing isn’t the only feature. 

The Killer shares a throughline with an entire heap of VOD actioners, the kind of random stuff that clogs any number of streamers’ what-to-watch boxes. What it’s better at is the casting of Emmanuel and Sy, both terrific, and how it becomes a welcome return for John Woo’s signature moves. It does what a lot of movies do. It just does it with Woo.   

Our Call: STREAM IT. John Woo’s reimagined The Killer enjoys its Parisian setting immensely, turns loose an eager, charming Nathalie Emmanuel on an assassin character full of creative ways to kill, and upholds Woo’s longstanding adoration for fluttering birds and conducting violence in shafts of light.

Johnny Loftus (@glennganges) is an independent writer and editor living at large in Chicagoland. His work has appeared in The Village Voice, All Music Guide, Pitchfork Media, and Nicki Swift.