Killer, The (4K UHD Review)
Director
John WooRelease Date(s)
1989 (December 2, 2025)Studio(s)
Golden Princess Film Production (Shout! Studios – Hong Kong Cinema Classics #18)- Film/Program Grade: A
- Video Grade: A-
- Audio Grade: B+
- Extras Grade: A-
Review
If Hard Boiled ended up being John Woo at his least restrained, unleashing all of his proclivities as a filmmaker and amplifying them to the Nth degree, his previous film The Killer (aka Dip huet seung hung) is still Woo at his most iconic—which isn’t too surprising, considering just how much that it’s filled with blatant iconography including churches, crosses, and white doves. Woo has always been open about his Christian faith, and that came to the fore with the redemption story that he told in The Killer, which also helped shape the visual style that he developed for the film (and has used ever since). A Better Tomorrow may have been his splashy entrance into the Hong Kong New Wave, but The Killer is what made John Woo into John Woo. It may or may not be the pinnacle of his career, but it’s arguably the dividing point between his earlier work and everything that has followed.
Still, Woo being Woo, as redemption stories go, The Killer is a particularly perverse one. Ah Jong (Chow Yun-fat) is a professional hitman with a long trail of dead bodies behind him. He wants to leave the life, so he has his old friend Fung Sei (Chu Kong) arrange one last job for him. That goes awry when Ah Jong accidentally blinds singer Jennie (Sally Yeh) during a shootout, and he’s so wracked by guilt that he disguises himself in order to help her regain her vision via an expensive cornea transplant. At the same time, he finds himself in the crosshairs between maverick police detective Li Ying (Danny Lee) on one side, and the ruthless Triad boss Wong Hoi (Shing Fui-on) on the other. Yet while Ah Jong and Li Ying are on opposite sides of the law, they share common ground together and quickly develop a grudging respect for each other. That ultimately puts both of them on the wrong side of Wong Hoi, with Jenny’s life (and vision) hanging in the balance. The Killer also stars Kenneth Tsang and Ricky Yi Fan-wai.
While Woo didn’t approve of the criminal lifestyles that he presented in his films, he clearly felt an affinity for Ah Jong. Despite his Lutheran upbringing, Woo makes films that are awash in levels of ultraviolence that would make even Alex DeLarge blush. Similarly, Ah Jong is deeply religious even though his job involves mass murder in suitably ultraviolent fashion. He wants to leave the life of a killer behind him, but whether he realizes it or not, he still has to atone for his sins in one way or another. He may have sublimated his guilt over all of those killings since his targets are never innocent victims, but after he accidentally disfigures the innocent Jenny, he’s consumed with guilt about it. Helping to restore her vision becomes a way for him to redeem his past. Still, the price for Christian redemption always involves blood, and Ah Jong doesn’t realize just how far that he’s going to have to go to wipe out the stain of his sin.
The Killer wears its influences on its sleeve, from Woo’s Christianity to Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samouraï and the crime films of Martin Scorsese, but there’s another influence on Woo’s story that rarely gets mentioned: Charlie Chaplin’s City Lights. In that film, the Little Tramp becomes obsessed with a blind flower girl who has mistaken him for a wealthy patron, and he sacrifices everything in order to raise the money for an operation to restore her vision. Yet he’s still ashamed of what he is, so he keeps up the ruse with her of being a millionaire. He wants her to see, but he doesn’t want her to see what he really is. In the end, with her sight restored, he prepares to fade off into the distance, but her vision is clear enough to go beyond superficial textures and see through to his overflowing heart.
Like the Little Tramp, Ah Jong doesn’t want Jenny to know what he is, especially since he’s the one responsible for her plight. He wants to help her despite the fact that he thinks she won’t accept him once she finds out who he really is. Yet like the flower girl, Jenny can see past his murderous exterior and even her own pain in order to understand the goodness in his heart—it may be buried deep, but it’s still there. Li Ying can see it as well, so he ends up torn between his mission to bring Ah Jong to justice and his desire to see the killer complete his redemption by helping Jenny. Ah Jong and Li Ying end up forming one of Woo’s patented unholy duos, but with the intersection between the two of them being Jenny, it’s really more of an unholy trinity (and that’s not even counting the villain this time). The Killer may display influences as varied as Melville, Scorsese, and Chaplin, but there’s also a shade of Sergio Leone present in the way that the characters are structured.
However, Woo once again being Woo, the redemption story in The Killer doesn’t work out the same way that City Lights did. Jenny may be able to see Ah Jong’s heart, but it’s not with her eyes. Li Ying grows to understand him as well, but Ah Jong’s sins run too deep for him to be able to atone for his past without paying the price in blood. However noble his intentions toward Jenny may be, that’s not enough for Woo’s moral balance sheet. And if Jenny is ever to have her vision restored, Ah Jong won’t be the one to make it happen. That’s ironic considering the works-oriented nature of Woo’s Lutheran faith, but Ah Jong’s good deeds with Jenny simply won’t be enough to redeem him or to save her. As a result, The Killer has one of the bleakest endings of Woo’s entire career. Instead of the iconic closeup of the Little Tramps’ hopeful face at the end of City Lights, The Killer ends with one of the most hopeless images that Woo ever crafted. Yet it’s no less iconic, and it’s part of what makes The Killer into Woo’s most iconic film (the white doves are just the icing on the cake).
Cinematographers Peter Pau and Wing-Hang Wong shot The Killer on 35mm film using Panavision cameras with spherical lenses, framed at 1.85:1 for its theatrical release. This version utilizes a 4K scan of the original camera negative, with digital restoration and grading performed by Duplitech (both Dolby Vision and HDR10 are included). There’s some instability during the opening logos, and unlike Hard Boiled, the credits don’t look like they’ve been recreated digitally against a clean background plate—they look like optical dupes this time. That’s going to be a running theme here since Woo’s films from this era relied heavily on optical work like dissolves, freeze frames, superimpositions, and other such effects. They weren’t cut in, either, so the entire leading and trailing shots were affected (at least this time Woo used high-speed cameras on set, so there isn’t as much step-printed slow motion). All of that material looks as soft as you would expect, and there’s some diffusion in the rest of the cinematography, but everything else looks as sharp and detailed as it can.
While there are a few light scratches and other damage marks in some of the opticals, the rest of the film looks clean aside from a stray hair that appears at the bottom edge of the frame in at least one shot. Speaking of which, the image is sharp enough here that it’s really easy to make out the long mole hair on Danny Lee’s face—once you’ve seen it, you won’t be able to stop seeing it in each and every shot. 4K resolution can be for good or for ill sometimes.
The colors all look accurate, and they haven’t been boosted artificially to make a more dramatic HDR grade. The Killer tends to be muted overall, but there are some rich (but relatively restrained) colors in the background of the cityscapes, especially in the night shots. Pau and/or Wong relied heavily on practical light sources like table lamps and streetlights, and they all have just enough glow without appearing too blown out. None of Woo’s Hong Kong films are ever going to be dazzling in 4K, and The Killer is no exception, but this is still a clear upgrade over all previous home video versions of the film. It’s not demo material, but it looks exactly like it should.
Audio is offered in Cantonese and English 2.0 mono DTS-HD Master Audio, with removable English subtitles. There might be just a touch of distortion in Lowell Lo’s iconic opening title theme (although it may simply be the nature of the synthesizers that he used), but other than that, everything else sounds clean with no other artifacts of note. Like most Hong Kong cinema from that era, The Killer was shot MOS with no sound recording on set, so the dialogue is all post-synced and doesn’t always integrate well into the soundstage. But that’s the nature of the beast.
(Note that the subtitles in this version have been newly translated in a more literal form, so Ah Jong and Li Ying no longer refer to each other as Mickey Mouse and Dumbo, Butthead and Numbnuts, or Tom and Jerry like they do in various other subtitled versions. Here, they call each other Shrimp Head and Little B, which is a more literal translation from the Cantonese, although their intent does get lost in translation since those phrases won’t have any meaning for western audiences.)
The Shout! Studios 4K Ultra HD release of The Killer is #18 in their Hong Kong Cinema Classics line. It’s a three-disc set that includes a Blu-ray with a 1080p copy of the film and an additional Blu-ray with the bulk of the extras. It also includes a 52-page booklet with essays by Grady Hendrix, Victor Fan, Calum Waddell, and Brandon Bentley. Everything comes housed in a rigid slipcase featuring new artwork by Cheol joo Lee (the insert on the Amaray case uses the original theatrical poster artwork instead). The following extras are included:
DISC ONE: UHD
- Commentary with John Woo and Drew Taylor
- Commentary with David West
- Commentary with John Woo and Terrence Chang
DISC TWO: BD
- Commentary with John Woo and Drew Taylor
- Commentary with David West
- Commentary with John Woo and Terrence Chang
Shout! has added two new commentaries for this release. The first pairs Woo with The Wrap journalist Drew Taylor, who acts as a moderator for the track. Woo says that The Killer is one of his favorites of his own films, and thanks Tsui Hark for giving him the creative freedom to make it. They discuss his inspirations like Le Samouraï, with Woo explaining that he was impressed by the way that Jean-Pierre Melville conveyed emotion visually. He admits that he never liked planning too much in advance, but prefers to work things out on set. He tells plenty of stories about how he did just that, including why he felt that it was necessary for the film to have a tragic ending. The nearly 80-year-old Woo is a little difficult to follow sometimes, but his memories are sound, so it’s an interesting track.
The second new commentary features critic David West, author of Chasing Dragons: An Introduction to the Martial Arts Film. He refers to The Killer as being the apotheosis of Woo’s “heroic bloodshed” style, and also explains Woo’s many influences like Le Samouraï and various Japanese yakuza films (both Woo and West comment on Ken Takekura’s influence). West provides some historical context (it had the misfortune of being released barely a month after the Tiananmen Square massacre), notes all of the nods to Melville’s film, and breaks down The Killer on a thematic level. Bringing everything full circle, he also notes some of the later films that have been influenced by Woo. West has a low-key manner of speaking, but he knows his stuff, so this is also a good listen.
Shout! has also included the archival commentary track from the 1993 Criterion Collection LaserDisc (which was ported over to their 1998 DVD). That’s a pretty big deal, because it hasn’t been offered anywhere else, at least until now. It’s one of Criterion’s patented curated tracks, with Woo and producer Terence Chang recorded separately and edited together. Woo dominates the track, discussing not just Le Samouraï but also the way that he was inspired by how Martin Scorsese used slow motion, not as a means of drawing out the action, but rather to express emotion. Chang offers some practical details about making the film. This was just four years after Woo and Chang made The Killer, so their memories were even fresher than in the new commentary and interviews, making this an invaluable archival inclusion.
DISC THREE: BD
- The Hero of Heroic Bloodshed (HD – 74:19)
- A Bullet Ballet (HD – 44:45)
- My Kind of Hero (HD – 6:06)
- Editing The Killer (HD – 11:58)
- Hong Kong Confidential (HD – 11:32)
- Deleted and Extended Scenes (Upscaled SD – 11:40)
- Trailers (HD – 6:02, 2 in all)
- Image Gallery (HD – 6:30)
The Hero of Heroic Bloodshed is a new feature-length documentary by High Rising Productions that traces Woo’s entire career from his early wuxia films forward, with a natural emphasis on his Hong Kong New Wave films like The Killer. It includes interviews that examine Woo’s work from within and without, with Woo and stuntperson Bruce Law covering the former, and a cornucopia of others who provide insights about the latter: critics Kim Newman and James Mudge; producer/writers Michael Colleary and Mike Werb; producer Lori Tilkin de Felice; director Roel Reiné; and academics like Luke White, Chen-Yu Lin, and Victor Fan. They address the themes in his films and his incomparable style, including a digression into his rare forays into explicit political commentary with Bullet in the Head (the subject of Tiananmen Square comes up again). Woo’s American period is also included, as his return to Hong Kong and eventual return to Hollywood once again. It’s a great overview of the career of one of cinema’s most iconic artists.
There are also four new interviews starting with A Bullet Ballet, which is an extended session with Woo. He emphasizes the improvisatory multi-camera nature of his Hong Kong filmmaking, his own Christianity, and how The Killer ended up expressing themes of redemption and forgiveness that many of his collaborators didn’t understand (his original cinematographer Peter Pau quit halfway through the shoot). My Kind of Hero is with Terence Chang, who breaks down the arduous process of making the film on location with a relatively low budget and long work days. He feels that The Killer is the film where Woo developed his signature style, much more so than on the A Better Tomorrow films. Editing The Killer is with music editor David Wu, who explains the process of fusing Lowell Lo’s score and the songs with Woo’s imagery. Hong Kong Confidential is another installment with with Grady Hendrix, co-author of These Fists Break Bricks, who says that The Killer is the movie where John Woo became John Woo. But getting there wasn’t easy, and Hendrix explains the difficulties that Woo faced in mounting the production and securing its iconic cast.
Finally, in addition to Trailers and an Image Gallery, there’s also a collection of Deleted and Extended Scenes that consists of alternate and extended footage that was used in the Mandarin-language cut of the film. While it’s a great collection of extras, there are a few things missing here from previous releases. Criterion’s CAV LaserDisc also included trailers for ten of Woo’s other Hong Kong films and a still-frame supplement with biographical information and a guide to Hong Kong cinema (it’s a shame that even Criterion doesn’t offer their old still-frame extras anymore). The Fox Lorber DVD offered a different commentary with Woo, while various overseas DVDs and Blu-rays included the Code of Bullets, Part 4 featurette and interviews with Sally Yeh, Peter Pau, and Kenneth Tsang. The 2010 Dragon Dynasty Blu-ray had an interview with Woo, a locations featurette, and two different Q&A sessions, one for The Killer and the other for Hard Boiled.
While this version easily supersedes the old Criterion DVD (though not their LaserDisc!), you may want to hang onto the Fox Lorber and/or Dragon Dynasty discs just for their unique extras. But you will want to upgrade regardless. This is another fantastic 4K makeover from the Shout! Studios Hong Kong Cinema Classics line, featuring a great slate of its own extras and huge visual improvements compared to any and all previous editions of the film. Grady Hendrix said it best: while Hard Boiled may be the Wooiest Woo movie that John Woo ever Wooed, The Killer is still the movie that made John Woo into the John Woo that fans know and love. It’s an essential addition to any comprehensive film library.
-Stephen Bjork
(You can follow Stephen on social media at these links: Twitter, Facebook, BlueSky, and Letterboxd).