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Catholic chapel, soaring music, crucifix and stained glass windows, Thousands, thousands of white candles, fore and aft!: It’s Chow Yun-fat!
Business-suited, silk scarf wearing, contemplating: Chow Yun-fat!
Who is singing the opening theme? Is this Sally Yeh? It looks like her! Yes it is! No doubt about it: Sally Yeh!!! 1
Kick-the-table, flip-the-gun-up, catch-the-gun and waste-the-bad-guy:
Check it out!
Chow Yun-fat!
Six minutes in; already blinded; Sally Yeh doth speak her mind:
How come you're so blurry?
Mug-the-Blind-Girl Fu! Garbage-Can Fu!
What could I know about her heart condition?: People complained me on every case!
We're twenty minutes in and CYf is playing Harmonica!: Harmonica played by Charles Bronson, played by CYf!
The bullets have been modified to suit your taste: Fondles Beretta, chased by a bear!
There's no corneas. Why don't you try a broad ?: Old Red Skelton jokes!
Now we have what appear to be Hong Kong war canoes!
Now CYf is in what appears to be a cigarette boat: Checking out the war canoes and clocking a pleasingly plump businessman!
As mentioned elsewhere: When CYf drives a cigarette boat, he sports a fake mustache!
CYf waves at a little girl in pigtails, but the little girl spots a sniper rifle by the glint from its scope. Now CYf spots the sniper rifle: There's going to be big trouble soon!
Diving-pistolero-on-sniper violence: The sniper loses!
Now we set fire to a fuel dump with a pistol shot: This guy's a badass!
Pigtails has been hit!
CYf to the rescue!
Now the cops are here!
Everybody shooting it out!
CYf steals a car, grabs the little girl!
And they're off!
Don't worry! It'll be fine! : Says he, as he stanches the gaping chest wound with a bandana!
Now in the emergency room with the little girl!
CYF brought her here!
Now the cops have shown up right behind him!
He's got to skedaddle!
CYF really likes emergency rooms!
Don't disrupt the doctor. Put your gun down: Heroic CYf!
The little girl is going to live -- her fingers are moving !: Cue the she’s-going-to-live music!
Now we've got a hospital escape foot-chase: Just like in Bullit! Frank George played by CYf!
He has a masculine quality: Quite a bit different from the average assassin!
We have codes in the underworld: We call these codes, The codes of the underworld!
That gun is empty : But this one isn't!
[One thing I will give these guys, they go down firing: And they wait patiently for their turn to be shot!] 2
You don't even know if you have any bullets left : Dirty Hairy played by CYf!
A Volvo and a 4wd Suzuki Jimny in a car chase, complete with shootout: You don't see that everyday!
She'd never lie to me : They are in the airport!
Now CYF has a goatee and a mustache: Like a very young Vladimir Lenin being shipped back to Moscow in a sealed railway car.
Best airport Baggage-Cart Fu: until Chunking Express’s Bridgette Lin airport scene!
The classic You-Are-Transferred-Off-This-Case Fu!
We're back to Bullit with a car-chase scene, except this time it's three cars. We've got a cop, and we've got an amigo, and we've got a bunch of triad killers, and we're bumping each other around!
And now we have a Bullit-drive-the-car-off-the-cliff scene (but no burst-in-flames) and we're down to two cars, the cop and CYf’s buddy!
These guys really emote when they know their friends are dying!
Don't worry, your eyes are fine: It's going to rain today!
CYf's wound cauterized with gunpowder taken from a shotgun shell : Save my corneas for Jenny!
Slow motion violence: Sam Peckinpaugh played by John Woo!
Madonna witnesses it all:And then collapses in flying shards of ceramics!
Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid: Played by Little B and Shrimp Head!
Rosebud! : Played by Chow Yun-fat!
Twenty minutes too long. 3
I always refer to John Woo as a genius, but he’s not my favorite Hong Kong film director. And The Killer is not my favorite John Woo, despite the fact that everybody raves about it. But having said all that, and after seeing it a handful of times, I have to say that my opinion of it grows with each viewing. What’s more, when I watch it, it is as though I am watching a new movie, not simply a new version, but a completely new movie! To me this is a sign of a great movie. Or maybe it’s just encroaching senility. Who knows? Mandatory viewing! Check it out!
Sally Yeh is so appealing, so compelling, that she's almost a distraction from the chaos which is the real business of the movie. [Although I've never understood the ending where CYf and Jenny crawl past each other, so I am probably missing something important about her. ]
Let's do some quick math. Let's take the population of Hong Kong when this movie was made in 1989, 5,540,570, and, using standard United Nations population metrics, multiply it by 60% to get the approximate number of adults, which is 3,324,342.
Now, conservatively, let’s assume each Hong Kong adult fires 100 rounds of ammo a day in the course of their everyday lives. Then, setting aside adjustments for leap centuries, say there are 365.25 days in a year…
How many rounds of ammunition a year is that for the whole city?
121,421,591,550 per annum. (Always underline your answer.)I say the movie is twenty minutes too long, but I may not understand the market as it existed at that time. These Hong Kong guys are not trying to impress film majors, they're trying to sell tickets. John Woo, as did Mozart and Sam Peckipaugh before him, witnessed some of his signature licks become cliches through the constant imitation of his admirers. So when I think, I’ve seen this before, what I may have seen is later copies of Woo’s work -- and specifically, what we are talking about here is his work as a choreographer of film mayhem!
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