The Killer (1986)

The Killer (1986)
Director: John Woo

Tagline: "One vicious hitman. One fierce cop. Ten thousand bullets." Haha! Yup. That just about sums it up.

Someone once said to Quentin Tarantion, "I suppose Woo can direct action scenes" to which Tarantino replied "Sure, and Michelangelo can paint ceilings." Well, "The Killer" is a John Woo movie, and there were plenty of action sequences. So if you want to see what Tarantino was talking about, watch this movie.

The movie is about a killer (this may explain the title) who accidentally blinds a girl during a gunfight. He feels bad after that and befriends her so that he can help her get an operation for new eyes. The only trouble is, she needs money; he should have money coming to him for a hit he performed, but the guy who hired him to do the hit doesn’t seem to want to give him the money. And the cops are hot on his trail.

This movie may have one of the highest body counts of any action film I have seen. The action sequences are what this movie is all about; they are so over the top I have a hard time knowing how to describe it. You have one guy (the Killer) with a pistol and he single handedly kills 30+ other guys with machine guns, shotguns, grenades etc. Every time a bad guy gets shot there is a huge spray of blood. Every time someone reels backwards or jumps into the air the movie goes into slow motion mode.

The action scenes have energy; I’ll give them that but they seemed a little cluttered to me. It was hard to get an understanding of where everyone was and what they were doing. Maybe that’s what Woo was trying to do. I personally like to know where all the key players are and what their strategies are, but that’s just me. This movie was a triumph of melodrama; so much so that it kind of took me out of the movie. I kept thinking "Wow. He single handedly shot 15 machine-gun guys with that little revolver of his; he is an amazing shot but all those dead guys really stink. Maybe they need to train more."

My rating: 3 out of 5