Despite inexplicably failing at the box office during its original release in its native Hong Kong, director John Woo’s 1989 action thriller The Killer became a major hit throughout the rest of the world during international distribution, and even decades later is still regarded as one of the greatest action movies ever made. You’d think it would have a decent high-definition home video release by now, but that hasn’t been the case. The best edition to date was a controversial unauthorized fan restoration effort from a small-time outfit that wound up bilking a lot of people out of some money.

Unfortunately, the Hong Kong film industry had a serious problem for many years of treating movies as disposable products. Film preservation was not taken seriously, and even cultural milestones like The Killer were neglected. Sorting out ownership and distribution rights is another challenge for many titles. In the case of The Killer specifically, the Criterion Collection was able to put out a pretty good Laserdisc edition in the mid-1990s, followed by a DVD in the early days of that format, but both were limited to non-anamorphic letterbox, standard-definition quality. Much better should be possible today. Sadly, we still haven’t seen this movie live up to its potential.

Title:	The Killer (a.k.a. 喋血雙雄)
Year of Release:	1989
Director:	John Woo
Watched On:	Blu-ray
Also Available On:	DVD

The Killer was the third collaboration between director John Woo and star Chow Yun-Fat, who had previously ushered in the “heroic bloodshed” genre with the blockbuster gangster dramas A Better Tomorrow and A Better Tomorrow II. Combining blazing action and soaring melodrama, those movies were a thrilling pop phenomenon, made Chow an instant cinematic icon, and propelled Woo into a position as one of the most exciting action filmmakers in world cinema. In many ways, The Killer is the apex of that cycle, and remains Woo’s masterpiece.

Chow stars as Ah Jong, a contract killer who lives by a strict code of ethics. He isn’t an evil man; he’s just a professional who has a job to do, and he’s very good at it. When a pretty nightclub singer (Sally Yeh) is blinded during a shootout that he instigated, Ah Jong feels responsible and takes it upon himself to care for her until she can get a cornea transplant. He also puts his own life in danger to save a child caught in the crossfire of a later gun battle. Actions like these put him at odds with his employers, who consider such sentiment a liability, and send squads of goons to take him out and clean up loose ends. While saving himself, Ah Jong forms a reluctant partnership with HK cop Lee Ying (Danny Lee), who’d also been pursuing him but recognizes in Ah Jong the similarities of their characters despite working on opposite sides of the law.

The plot is very simple and pure pulp, punctuated by regular bouts of bloody violence, acrobatic stunts, and thousands upon thousands of bullets fired. Prior to John Woo, any number of directors had used slow-motion to add some tension to an action scene, but Woo made an art form out of it. In a Woo film, the action set-pieces don’t stretch out the story; the action is the story. The filmmaker romanticizes action and violence as metaphors for the personalities of his characters. The plentiful gunfights are amazingly choreographed, yet make no pretense toward realism. Weapons hold an unlimited supply of ammunition and only require reloading at moments of dramatic convenience. The heroes can survive multiple gunshot wounds without hardly slowing them down. If logically absurd, the heightened unreality elevates the drama to operatic proportions.

Making a conceit like this work is a delicate balancing act, but in his prime John Woo could pull it off better than just about any other filmmaker alive. Whether he’s been able to recapture that glory in his later work is a matter of some debate.

The Sad and Frustrating Tale of Hong Kong Rescue

The only legitimate release of The Killer on the Blu-ray format in North America happened back in 2010, from the Dragon Dynasty label (distributed by Vivendi Entertainment). The disc was sourced from a 1080i master that likely originated for overseas broadcast TV use, and had been poorly converted from 50Hz to 60Hz using field-blending that left it with often smeary-looking motion. Picture quality was dull and noisy, and audio was limited to very weak Dolby Digital mono tracks in the the original Cantonese or an English dub. Extras included a couple interviews with John Woo, a featurette about shooting locations, and some trailers. All in all, it was a very underwhelming home video edition. Nevertheless, I have some fondness for it, if only because a blurb from a DVD review I’d written a few years earlier (which I have unrepentantly recycled above) is quoted on the front cover artwork, albeit without actually crediting me by name.

Around a decade later, a small bootleg label called Hong Kong Rescue began hyping a new fan restoration of The Killer. I have mixed feelings about telling this story, which started out with great promise but ended in disaster. While I was able to eventually receive a copy of the disc, many who paid for it were not so fortunate.

A one-man operation by an enterprising fan of Asian cinema, I honestly believe Hong Kong Rescue was started with good intentions. Although its work may have been unauthorized, the outfit’s mission statement was to reclaim films that had been neglected or treated poorly by their proper owners. By combining the best available audio, video, and bonus features from home video releases around the world, editing them together, improving them when possible, then authoring them to disc and packaging them up into a professional-looking product, the goal was to create the ultimate edition of a given title – one better than its official distributors might ever bother to deliver on their own.

Prior to The Killer, I’d bought a couple of other Hong Kong Rescue Blu-rays without too much incident. When first tipped off to the endeavor, I’d been warned by a friend to expect very slow shipping on any order I placed. Indeed, the discs I purchased took several weeks to arrive. Regardless, when I got them, I was pretty happy with them.

By the time the HKR edition of The Killer went up for sale on the Hong Kong Rescue web site in 2021, however, something had clearly fallen apart behind the scenes. The project had been pushed back multiple times, and complaints spread on social media that orders were being delayed well beyond even the normal slow wait. Weeks and months went by with no product shipped. Meanwhile, the creator churned out long-winded newsletters week after week apologizing for the backlog and describing in detail the many upcoming projects he was juggling. At a certain point, it became obvious that he was hopelessly over his head.

I finally received a copy of The Killer in my hand more than a full year after paying for it. Getting it required me sending a number of emails threatening to file a PayPal dispute until the disc finally went out in the mail. The Hong Kong Rescue web site was taken down from the internet shortly afterward. My understanding is that the majority of people who paid for this Blu-ray simply lost their money with nothing ever delivered to them and no refunds ever made. The whole situation was disheartening.

The Blu-ray: Video & Audio

For what it’s worth, the Hong Kong Rescue edition of The Killer is up to the standard of prior HKR Blu-rays I own – which is to say that, as a bootleg item, it may not be perfect, but it’s a good-faith effort to provide as high a quality product as possible given the circumstances.

The two-disc set contains three different versions of the movie. The first disc includes both the 111-minute Hong Kong theatrical cut (acknowledged to be John Woo’s preferred cut) and a 124-minute Mandarin extended cut. I mainly focused on the former. Both are authored as full separate encodes on the same disc. I’m not sure that was really the best decision, but I also don’t know that the source material for either one was hurt too much by it.

The biggest limitation to this project is that the best available high-definition source for The Killer is the Dragon Dynasty Blu-ray. HKR made several efforts to improve upon that master – first, by correcting the field-blending and restoring the original 24 fps frame rate. The original Chinese opening and end credits have also been restored to the film (upscaled from DVD sources). Some dirt and print damage have been digitally painted out, and the color grading has been adjusted to pull back a murky red push, using the Criterion Laserdisc as a reference.

Overall, I would say that the HKR Blu-ray is a modest improvement over the Dragon Dynasty disc. Unfortunately, it can’t overcome the lack of detail in that transfer’s 1.85:1 image, and attempts to “denoise” it leave it looking even softer in many scenes. Upscaling and processing with fancy A.I. algorithms have mixed results at best. For whatever reason or necessity, some stretches of footage are clearly upconverted from standard-definition, and others look barely any better than it.

What this movie really needs is a fresh, high-res film scan from the Original Camera Negative, should it still exist in usable condition, or at least from a good quality Internegative or Interpositive. That was obviously beyond the scope of this project. Whether any of those things will ever be available is unknown to me at this time.

For the primary Hong Kong theatrical cut, HKR offers three different Cantonese audio tracks from different sources, one English dub, and one Mandarin dub. Of the original Cantonese language options, by far the best is the PCM mono from the Criterion Laserdisc, which may have a little bit of hiss and crackle but also has the most robust gunshots. Both the Scandanavian DVD track and the HKR-exclusive “hybrid” track are much too noise-reduced and have very wimpy gunfire.

Note that none of the audio options have particularly good lip sync with the dialogue. During this time period, most movies in the Hong Kong film industry were shot without live audio recording on set, and all dialogue was “looped” on a soundstage later. Lip sync was not particularly a concern for either filmmakers or audiences in that region.

The disc has three different English subtitle options, each from a different translation. In this case, HKR’s own exclusive translation seems to be the most literal and generally satisfying (better than Criterion’s), though it also has an annoying affectation of displaying song title and artist credits on screen during music passages, and features a persistent typo in misusing the word “flavour” instead of “favor” (as in, “Do me a flavour”).

Alternate Versions

I didn’t watch much of the Mandarin extended cut. From what I can tell, most of the added length comes down to minor extensions to existing scenes, rather than whole new scenes. This version was upconverted from a French DVD that appears to have been scanned from a pretty worn print with simultaneous burned-in Chinese and English subtitles. The English translation is… not great.

The longest version of the movie, the 136-minute Taiwanese extended cut, is found on Disc 2. This one has even more padding and filler, and feels like an unrefined rough cut. Taken from a VHS source with a fuzzy picture, bad cropping, and terrible tracking errors, it’s an interesting curiosity, but basically unwatchable.

Other Bonus Features

Three audio commentaries are available over the Kong Kong theatrical cut on the first disc:

• John Woo (Fox Lorber DVD)
• John Woo and producer Terrence Chang (Criterion Laserdisc/DVD)
• Film producer/historian Bey Logan (Hong Kong Legends DVD)

Disc 2 is loaded with supplements culled from discs from around the world, some more substantive than others. Among them are interviews, featurettes, deleted scenes, image galleries, trailers, and some bits of nonsense fluff like a “Kill Count” video and another highlight reel of the action scenes. A “Restoration” featurette provides 17 minutes of before-and-after and side-by-side comparison clips from the work Hong Kong Rescue performed on The Killer, while an HKR trailer teases future releases that sadly never came to be.

At the end of the day, I’m glad to have the disc and don’t regret supporting Hong Kong Rescue during the period when it was still a mostly honest business venture. However, I’m saddened by how badly the whole thing fell apart and how many people got scammed by it at the end.

In the meantime, a few legitimate home video boutique labels such as Eureka!, 88 Films, and Arrow Video have taken up the cause of officially licensing and restoring Hong Kong classics. Although none of them have yet gotten to The Killer, perhaps one of them will some day, and might produce an official home release that surpasses this one. Until then, I’ll hold onto this Hong Kong Rescue disc as the best available (if still compromised) option for watching John Woo’s best film.

Related

• Hard-Boiled (1992)
• Hard Target (1993)

Other Awesome Movies of 1989

• The Abyss
• Batman
• Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade
• Leviathan
• Road House
• UHF
• The Wizard