The director’s 1989 Hong Kong action touchstone is a wild melding of maximalist violence and surreal sentimentality – with added harmonica
John Woo’s 1989 thriller is a reminder of the director’s habit of hitching the craziest of mayhem to a mile-wide streak of earnest emotionalism and sentimentality; a strong and under-acknowledged part of why his films are so addictive. There’s a lot of bleeding in these violent movies – and bleeding hearts also. With The Killer, Woo somehow became the Douglas Sirk of Hong Kong action cinema, in a gonzo melodrama that borrows from Magnificent Obsession (which Sirk remade from a 1935 film by John Stahl), about the redemption of an…
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