The following review of Peacock’s The Killer contains some spoilers for the 2024 movie and the 1984 original.

John Woo’s 1989 Hong Kong action thriller The Killer is one of the best assassin movies ever made. I say that as a devout lover of assassin films — from the simple, formulaic but still flashy fare to the more complex narratives that grapple with death, violence, and redemption in interesting ways. Give me a hitman, and I’m locked in. And The Killer really is a standout in the canon, a rare killer-for-hire film that doesn’t feel trite or overwrought in how it considers the innocent casualties of assassin work and instead bakes its protagonist’s guilt into the plot. It’s a shoot ’em up bloodfest that’s also surprisingly romantic, sweet even, in moments. Woo’s script is somehow both simple and deep, his killer emotional, and the various relationships well defined and meaningful. All of that is thrown out the window in Peacock’s 2024 remake of The Killer, directed by Woo but written by three men who seemingly don’t understand what gave the original its juice.

In the 1989 film, hitman Ah Jong accidentally hurts a bystander during a shootout: club singer Jennie, whose corneas are severely damaged as a result. Hoping to get out of the biz, he takes one last job in order to secure the money to pay for an expensive surgery to restore her eyesight, but along the way, his guilt leads him to return to the club where Jennie sings over and over, saving her from a mugger, and introducing himself as a stranger. They fall in love, and she’s eventually told by others he’s the man responsible for her injuries. There are other specific plot and character relationship details crucial to the film, but I won’t wander too far into the weeds. Just know Ah Jong also has a complicated long-time friendship with his handler Fung Sei, and he also strikes up an unlikely allyship with a cop, Detective Li Ying, who is struck by the hitman’s moral code. It’s a great film, one that has inspired many others, and it’s unfortunately pretty impossible to stream by above-board means.

What you can stream as of today is the 2024 remake, which took a very windy road to completion (seriously, reading the “Production” section of the Wikipedia page detailing various failed attempts at this long-gestating remake beginning in 1992 might be a more thrillingly twisty endeavor than the remake itself). The remake genderswaps our main hitman, presenting a female assassin named Z, played by Nathalie Emmanuel. When I realized the club singer in the film would still also be a woman and had not been genderswapped, I of course wondered if the remake would be queer, adding a new layer to that central relationship from the original. The trailer didn’t reveal much, but Emmanuel’s general vibe pinged. I held onto hope.

Well, I’m sorry to say, it isn’t queer at all. And that would perhaps be fine, but it’s also not very good or, at least, a massive failure as a remake. I enjoy when remakes evolve, shift, even drastically change various elements. Plot deviation isn’t the issue with 2024’s The Killer; it’s the departures on the more thematic level that disappoint greatly. Whereas the original tells the story of a hitman reckoning with hurting an innocent woman, complicated further by their subsequent romantic relationship, The Killer (2024) tells the story of hitman Zee who, yes, does unintentionally wound a woman during a job, an aspiring singer named Jenn (Diana Silvers). But then Z’s next job becomes killing Jenn, who is connected to the overarching organized crime plot. A bunch of gangsters are fighting over a bunch of heroin, and she’s caught up in it all because she’s dating one of them. Zee can’t bring herself to kill her, and while the script does go out of its way to explain why, it’s unconvincing. Meanwhile, Zee teams up unexpectedly with detective Sey (Omar Sy), who is trying to bring down the “bad guys” but keeps getting impeded by police corruption and bureaucracy.

The Killer (2024) almost but doesn’t quite arrive at saying something interesting about the intersections between policework and contract killing. It’s more deftly done in the original, which suggests its hitman and cop are alike in the sense they both believe they have moral codes and yet have no real way of preserving them in the hyper-violent and corrupt systems in which they operate. The remake stabs at that same message haphazardly, but it ultimately falls into the trap of positioning Sey as the good cop among the dirty ones. I’m left wondering if the screenwriters opted for a Parisian setting in order to avoid contending with the politics of an American “good” cop for a protagonist. But France’s police system is also very bad. I’m not saying there’s no way to make an entertaining and smart film about a cop and an assassin teaming up, but The Killer lacks any of the nuance or ambition it would take to pull off a more thought-provoking story.

Genderswapping the main character doesn’t actually yield anything novel either and ends up feeling like mainly a stunt. Nathalie Emmanuel is excellent, yes. In fact, her performance along with Sy’s and expectedly gorgeous action direction by Woo are the film’s saving graces. But the script is peppered with hokey lines like “never send boys to do a woman’s job.” Jenn at one point corrects herself when talking about Zee from “hitman” to “hitwoman.” I don’t need Girl Power™ from my assassin movies; I want to see women in complex and morally complicated roles. Zee is given a tragic backstory that involves an addict mother and a bad, abusive man. Her relationship with her handler Finn is less friendship or even coworker, more controlling hybrid father-boyfriend figure. It’s as if this is the only way the makers of The Killer believed an audience would buy a female assassin. It has to come from trauma. Perhaps these were merely attempts to deepen the moral texture and humanity of the character who might otherwise come off as just a sleek, emotionless killer.

But in the original The Killer, that’s all done expertly in the actual timeline of the film, not in backstory or in dialogue. It’s what the entire premise hinges on, Ah Jong sympathizing with Jennie to the extent it upends his work and life. I’m not mad at The Killer (2024) for avoiding a romantic relationship between Zee and Jenn purely because I wanted the film to be queer; I’m mad at The Killer (2024) for avoiding a romantic relationship between Zee and Jenn because it completely flattens the stakes and undermines all of the best themes and ideas of the original.

I don’t usually like to grade remakes so harshly against their originals, just like I don’t like to grade adaptations too harshly against their source material, but it’s that failure to capture the overall spirit and thematic potency that bothers me way more than any kind of change to plot or surface-level details. Without the romantic relationship between hitman and bystander, without the friendship between hitman and handler, and without the sharp and poignant look at how both a hitman and cop trick themselves into believing they can do their jobs morally, The Killer (2024) just doesn’t have much fuel to run on. It’s got strong performances and some stylish action sequences, but even the final big set piece shootout, which directly references the original, lacks the life of its predecessor. Even watching the 1984 version now, that bloody, action-packed climax of a fight scene is awe-inducing. Woo’s style and vision as an action director is still present here, but it’s not a sequence I feel especially compelled to revisit. Perhaps that’s because everything leading up to it fails to set the stage with authority.

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