Kill baby kill
So the conventional line is that John Woo's remake of his 1989 classic is handsomely mounted but has nowhere near the intensity and bravura style of the original.
To be honest I didn't really like the original, a cross between Jean-Pierre Melville's Le Samourai and (of all things) Douglas Sirk's Magnificent Obsession; thought it turgid, clumsy in the way it assembles its pieces then raises its stakes. The finale is spectacular, but the spectacle of hero and girl crawling blindly towards each other-- like to think my tolerance for cheese is high but Woo managed to zoom past my limit without even pausing to wave hello. Thought Hard Boiled arrived at a less sentimental resolution and Bullet in the Head boasted of more baroque action sequences; thought Hard Target was an engagingly lean killing machine and Face/Off a more enjoyable dramatization of the yin/yang good/evil dichotomy the filmmaker loves to embed in the center of his action epics. O, and Windtalkers? The most actionpacked (least plausible, most demented) World War 2 film ever made.
This Killers is a different creature, and I don't just mean the gender flip; elegant Paris replaces bustling Hong Kong, and cool professionalism swaps out for smoldering romanticism. The screenplay-- by Brian Helgeland, Josh Campbell, and Matt Stuecken-- does a nominally more logical take on John Woo's original script, a series of plots within plots with double crosses complicating the overall plot, and the reveals actually get every bit as intricate narrativewise as the original script was intricate emotionwise (only guessing but possibly Helgeland's work in L.A. Confidential and Mystic River may have something to do with all the convolutions).
I suspect the nonfans' real complaint is that they miss the larger-than-life feelings, the unabashed romanticism of Chow Yun Fat's hired assassin, not to mention the intense bond he develops with Daniel Lee's investigating detective. Can't definitively say they're wrong-- but I've stated my own reactions to the original, and can't help but consider this an improvement.
Woo loves foreplay, and in the case of Nathalie Emmanuel's Zee (hired killer) and Diana Silvers' Jenn (blinded bystander) throws in the kind of homoerotic frisson he likes to tease us with in his earlier Hong Kong actioners only with beauties not big boys; later Zee develops a flirty relationship with Omar Sy's Police Inspector Sey-- but in both cases Woo's just playing with us. Nothing really develops beyond a kind of world-weary respect, a wary attachment; these are wounded creatures and they're careful who they give their loyalties to-- with this film Woo seems to be developing past his admittedly riveting operatic dramas and straying into Michael Mann/Jean-Pierre Melville territory, fashioning an abstraction of a drama rather than the frankly tired recycling of one, where these too-cool-for-school characters invest what emotions they have into what partnerships they can afford to forge along the way, suppressing any overt and unnecessary displays of affection.
Meanwhile Woo keeps his signature style, if anything keeps it as hotly intense as ever (helps to have the relatively larger budget of a Hollywood/international co-production): the flapping doves, the balletic slow motion, the motorbike wheels burning circles on sidewalks and church floors-- this is Woo's trademark kinetic exuberance, performed with uncharacteristic dispassion. Emmanuel and Silvers and later Emmanuel and Sy make handsome couples and maybe my one major disappointment is that they fail to make it a threesome-- but I forget, this is a dangerous profession, and they must keep their distance. Is this how Woo feels about practicing his profession with fellow professionals, after years surviving in the Hong Kong, later Hollywood, now international filmmaking industry? Must be a helluva jungle out there.
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