• 喋血雙雄 (The Killer)

10/25/25 (Sat)

Woo followed his breakout A Better Tomorrow and its sequel with this 1989 thriller. An assassin (Chow Yun-fat) agrees to one final job before retirement (this “final job” trope could be a genre on its own). He succeeds in gunning down an entire gang in a nightclub, but accidentally blinds a female nightclub singer who gets too close to the action. Plagued with guilt, he gets close to her without revealing his identity and vows to himself to get the money for a corneal operation that will restore her sight.

At the same time, the triad boss who hired him for the kill now wants him dead. A bloody shootout ensues in which a child is injured. Even as Chow manages to escape, he brings the child to a hospital. A detective (Danny Lee) on the case is intrigued that Chow would risk his own life to get the child to safety, especially in light of his relation with the blind singer. Sensing human feeling inside the killer, he becomes obsessed with capturing Chow. After numerous betrayals and plot twists, Lee ends up fighting the bad guys alongside Chow until the final climax, where they confront a triad gang at a church in a you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it battle.

No point in going into the details. The plot is similar to Tomorrow in that two opposing forces become allies in the end. Woo injects more humor and sentiment this time. He tries both at the same time in a “Mexican standoff” between the two leads, each pointing a gun at the other while attempting not to alarm the oblivious blind girl standing next to them. The relationship between the two protagonists has been described as homoerotic, but that sounds more like projection by gay critics. The film doesn’t imply anything along those lines, and the plot brings them together in a natural way as both fight the triad boss from opposite sides. Woo was evidently inspired by the “Spy Vs Spy” comic in Mad Magazine, which makes a lot more sense. The Chinese title of this film is “Two Blood-Spattered Heroes”, putting both guys at center rather than the single killer of the English title.

There’s some interesting Christian imagery as well (Woo himself is Christian). Chow is splayed shirtless at one point against the church pews as his peers remove a bullet, his arms spread out with a crucifix on view behind him. In the final battle, a statue of Mary is blown apart and other iconography, such as an impossible number of candles, is destroyed. A bevy of doves makes a memorable appearance as well. I have no idea what that’s all supposed to mean, but I’m sure it’s very profound.

The film lays on the melodrama pretty thick in some parts, especially scenes involving Chow and the blind singer, making me think of Jane Wyman in The Magnificent Obsession. The highlight, if that’s what you call it, was the ending. Chow has vowed to devote his corneas to the singer if he should die, but in the church battle he ironically gets his eyes shot out. As they crawl blindly toward each other amid the shootout, desperately calling each other’s names, he dies as she crawls past him unknowingly. That would have been a great silent film sequence.

This film is generally ranked higher than Tomorrow, and the action scenes are as awesome as ever. But the turn to sentiment here, like the struggling blind woman singing the sad ballad and the frightened little girl caught up in the gun battle, felt like Woo was trying too hard to humanize his characters, especially Chow. The earlier film was more straightforward, avoiding any mushiness even in the relation between the brothers. Still, it’s a fun watch as long as we don’t take it too seriously.