The Killer (2024)

John Woo has returned to his own 1989 Hong Kong film and remade it in Paris, which is a curious act of self-cannibalism. The most consequential alteration is the lead: the brooding male hitman becomes Zee, a Black woman known to the underworld as the Queen of the Dead, played by Nathalie Emmanuel after Lupita Nyong'o departed the project years earlier. Omar Sy takes the detective role. This was a deliberate reimagining, executed at the casting stage, and it registers plainly on the representation ledger. The film, whether out of confidence or indifference, never pauses to announce the significance of any of it. Zee simply is who she is, dispatching men in a nightclub before the title card has settled.

That gives the picture a female action lead without a feminist argument attached, a distinction worth keeping straight. Emmanuel carries the gun and the movie, and the screenplay leaves the thesis unwritten. The supporting cast is thoroughly multiracial, a fact of Parisian life that the narrative treats as furniture. Race is present in the faces and absent from the text. Nobody delivers a speech. Nobody learns a lesson about the heroin shipment or the corrupt inspector Jax.

The ledger elsewhere runs clean. There is no romance between women, no climate anxiety, no meditation on bodies, no neurodivergent subplot, and no critique of capital, though the plot is soaked in drug money. The villains are cartels and handlers, the oldest kind of evil, requiring no economic theory. History goes unrevised. As for sermonizing, the film has none. It has doves, slow motion, and a body count. What we are left with is a remake that modernizes its cast and leaves its conscience in 1989, where it seems content to remain.