The Modern Transposition of Wuxia in John Woo’s The Killer (喋血雙雄, 1989)

> Over the last few decades, numerous works have engaged with wuxia in a modern diegetic space, such as David Lai, Jeffrey Lau and Corey Yuen’s Saviour of the Soul, which retells Jin Yong’s novel The Return of the Condor Heroes as an artistic future fantasy; Johnnie To’s The Heroic Trio, known for its gimmicky martial arts presentation; Stephen Chow’s Kung Fu Hustle, which parodies the tradition. One of the few directors that have achieved this modern transposition most thoroughly and profoundly, is John Woo. [...] I will examine his work in this essay, in terms of its construction of the jianghu space, transposition of the aesthetics of violence and dialogue with key wuxia themes. Among Woo’s films, The Killer (1989) seems to me the best representation of this transposition.