First images from The Killer tease John Woo’s streaming movie remake of his own classic 1989 film. Chow Yun-Fat played hitman Ah Jong in Woo’s original action thriller, a stylish and violent movie that helped make Yun-Fat a star of international film, while propelling Woo toward legendary status. Now over thirty years after the original movie became a landmark of Hong Kong cinema, The Killer is making a comeback on Peacock, in a remake described as a “radical re-imagining” of the first movie.
With Woo’s new take on his film set to release on Peacock on August 23, 2024, IGN debuts three first-look images from the movie, featuring stars Nathalie Emmanuel and Omar Sy, as well as director Woo himself. Check them out below::
Emmanuel’s mysterious assassin Zee and Sy’s police inspector Sy are seen in two of the images, one that looks to show an interrogation scene, and the other that sees the pair brandishing their weapons in a classic Woo pose. The third image shows Emmanuel and Sy sharing a lighthearted moment with Woo behind-the-scenes.
Emmanuel And Sy’s Relationship Is At The Heart Of The Killer
The synopsis for Woo’s remake of The Killer describes Emmanuel’s Zee as an assassin, known in the Parisian underworld as “The Queen of the Dead.” Sy’s character Sy is a police investigator, who becomes interested in Zee’s activities after she refuses to undertake a hit on a blinded woman named Jenn (Diana Silvers), a decision that has big consequences for Zee.
Though Zee and Sy begin on opposite sides of the law, as the investigator tries to track down the almost mythic assassin, they will wind up having to team up, as Emmanuel teased to IGN in an interview, saying:
And they realize as they meet each other they’re not that different. You know the saying like recognizes like. And that’s very true for Sy and Zee when they meet. And they both have a code, they both have, I guess, an integrity, but they sort of work on opposite sides of the law.
The new images released by IGN tease both sides of Sy and Zee’s relationship, one showing them literally on opposite sides of a table, and the other seeing them in team-up mode. How their teaming shakes out in The Killer is yet to be seen, but the film seems to center on their relationship, as Zee’s fateful decision forces her into a desperate partnership. With Woo behind-the-camera, things are bound to get operatically violent, but the story from the original film will get a new twist, courtesy of screenwriter Brian Helgeland, and Woo himself.