Movies About Assassins Give Modern Audiences Something They Desperately Crave: A World With Consequences For Bad Behavior

Generally thought of as action films, I’ve come to regard movies about assassins more specifically as wish-fulfillment fantasies, offshoots of James Bond/Ethan Hunt superspy franchises, complete with networks of surreptitious control and licenses to kill. Fantasies because they involve world-building, shadow governments using specialized lingo, standardized methods of payment and communication, and operatives placed in mundane positions ready to spring into action at a coded command. Even within the assassin genre of pictures are various, often cross-pollinated subgenres: the gangster/triad/yakuza film, the shadow government conspiracy picture, the revenge scenario where a retired spook is spurred back to action by the death or abduction of a loved one. Of these, the ones most fascinating to me are the ronin pictures: the films about assassins that are entirely mercenary, freebooters plying their trade at the discretion of the highest bidder, bounty hunters. Flag Captain Piett in The Empire Strikes Back refers to these creatures as “scum,” his disdain driven by what he perceives to be their lawlessness, their lack of order, but really they’re rebels who work within their own set of regulations. When I say that it’s a wish-fulfillment fantasy to be a bounty hunter, it’s partially because I think people might sometimes like to kill and get away with it; but more and more I’m thinking it’s because just the notion that there are consequences for the bad guys in this world can feel like a quixotic dream.

It might seem counterintuitive, but assassin films represent the opposite of chaos. It’s obvious why it is reassuring when it’s a “good” government taking out the bad guys, but when trust in government erodes, the catharsis provided by shadow governments doing the wet work increases. When the people we trust to do the right thing fail to do it, at least there’s a secret cabal of puppetmasters keeping the wolf from the door. The popularity of the John Wick series popularity is due a lot of things — it’s a series that respects its audience and its sources, for one — but I wonder if the reason it’s found so firm a foothold in our entertainment landscape isn’t due in large part to its obsession with consequences. (Consider that when its characters drink, the most popular toast is a shouted “consequences!”) Wick kills his first 100 people enraged because someone ancillarily connected to them killed his dog. He kills his next few hundred largely out of self-defense because his initial response was maybe out of proportion to the initial offense. No one in these films is above the law and that, by itself, is a concept as quaint as it is heartening. I love these films for their obsession with accountability — not just internally, but in the extent to which they callout the works that came before it to which they owe so much of their visual style and ethos. I think of the John Wick series as Scream for the assassin genre: movies so smart and respectful of their sources that are also sterling examples of those films they dissect. Now that the fourth (and possibly last?) John Wick picture has opened to huge numbers at the box office, take a tour through a few of the films to which this tetralogy owes its themes, character types and, in a few cases, entire scenes. 

Start with Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967) in which the impossibly debonair Alain Delon plays hired killer Jef, a fedora’d and trenchcoated man who lives alone with his parakeet and stalks the Parisian streets carrying out the dirty work he “was paid to do.” The great joke of the film, I think, is that Jef isn’t very good at his job but he does looks spectacular doing it. The coolness of his fit, the “mod” hipness of Melville’s ice-blue visual sense and direction, define the liquid-smooth vibe the John Wick films riff off. Wick, wearing a bulletproof 42-regular suit, emulates Jef in terms of style even as he surpasses him in physical execution.

Le Samourai is the chief inspiration for John Woo’s The Killer (1989), too, perhaps the single most influential action film of the last fifty years. In that one, Chow Yun-Fat as the titular killer is tracked by a cop (Danny Lee) who begins to recognize that both of them are tools in a larger game: just opposite sides of the same devalued coin. The shootouts are legendary: choreographed to precision over the course of weeks for single sequences, and in the middle of it there’s a long chat in a candlelit church between two old friends right before everything goes finally, fatally wrong. (You’ll recognize this scene faithfully recreated for John Wick 4.) The balletic brutality of The Killer won the attention and admiration of American director Walter Hill as well; he wrote a remake of it that remains unrealized. Echoes of Woo’s action style surface, however, in Hill’s Bullet to the Head (2012) as a terrifying assassin played by Jason Momoa uses knives and pistols in ways that will become very familiar to Wick fanatics in two years’ time. Nothing after The Killer in action cinema in the world looked the same as it did before.

I want to note, too, the concept of reluctance. We like reluctant heroes because they speak to a humility we all believe we demonstrate. It’s what drives the killers in The Disappearance (1977) played by Donald Sutherland and The Domino Principle (1977) played by Gene Hackman; in little Hanna (Saoirsie Ronan) of Hanna (2011) and of Stephanie (Blake Lively) in Reed Morano’s criminally underappreciated The Rhythm Section (2020). There’s nothing so thrilling for us besides as when someone goaded into action proves themselves proficient in the art of violence. We like when bullies get what they deserve, a base kink David Cronenberg skewers in his scabrous A History of Violence (2005). I think we see ourselves this way as a nation: an identity forged during WWII when our unforgivably solipsistic policy of war-profiteering isolationism was spurred into action by the Japanese attack of Pearl Harbor.

One of my favorite quotes, back from when I was first studying history, is taken from the diaries of Japanese Admiral Isoroku Yamamoto who wrote of the attack “I fear all we have done is to awaken a sleeping giant and fill him with a terrible resolve.” It still gives me a patriotic thrill when I read that, thrumming pure and true through a sense of nationalism that’s taken some bad hits. What we learn the most from history, though, is how the bullied, once given power, seldom resist the urge to become the bullies themselves. The Caine character played by Donnie Yen in John Wick 4 is blind and armed primarily with a sword in clear and direct homage to Ken Shimozawa’s Zatoichi character, a blind swordsman and masseuse adapted dozens of times in 100 episodes of serialized television drama and in 26 feature films starring Shintaro Katsu. There was a Spaghetti Western version, Blindman (1971), an Americanized version Blind Fury (1989) starring Rutger Hauer, incarnations where Zatoichi is a woman named O-Ichi and others where he is a Lynx-man in the kid’s cartoon series “Thundercats.” A big fan of Beat Takeshi, I also love his 2003 adaptation The Blind Swordsman: Zatoichi. In each incarnation, including Yen’s in John Wick 4, Zatoichi is a reluctant fighter, a man of peace pushed into action just like John used to be.

For films about assassin guilds, seek out Basil Deardon’s The Assassination Bureau (1969), an adaptation of an unfinished Jack London novel that finds suffragette journalist Sonia Winter (Diana Rigg) in 1914 who, outraged by her discovery of a corporation founded to carry out assassinations on behalf of monied clients, hires the company to kill its own founder, Ivan Dragomiloff (Oliver Reed). Done in the lighthearted, globetrotting tone of Michael Todd’s Best Picture-winning Around the World in 80 Days (1956), Sonia and Ivan accidentally kill Arch Duke Ferdinand (thus starting WWI) and even more accidentally, fall in love. Irreverent and fleet, its premise that there is an entrepreneurial mechanism driving political assassination is carried through into Alan Pakula’s 1974 masterpiece The Parallax View in which another journalist, this time played by Warren Beatty, discovers that a “Parallax Corporation” may be responsible for carrying out the spate of political assassinations which snuffed out the progressive dream at the end of the 1960s. Bernardo Bertolucci’s ravishing The Conformist (1970) suggests a similarly mendacious root for politically-motivated mayhem in its story of an assassin who is the product of trauma and a lifetime of indoctrination. All three films suggest that for good or ill, there is at least a hidden order driving historical atrocity. Chaos would be worse, wouldn’t it? 

Michael Winner’s The Mechanic (1972) plays like an interlude in the same universe spent with one of the blue-collar functionaries of these anonymous murder corporations. Even his title of “mechanic” says a lot about the architecture of these universes. And indeed, aren’t we all just functionaries in others’ grand designs? I wonder if part of the attraction of these films isn’t that we all feel compromised to some extent by where we get our money in a capitalist state where there’s no longer any such thing as ethical consumption. The titular Mechanic is Arthur Bishop (Charles Bronson), a professional murderer who lives a lonesome lifestyle full of classical music and fine wines and who, after a hit of an old friend, decides to take on an apprentice. He’s given detailed dossiers on his targets, paid in cash, manipulated by a grand plot of which he has no part and, fatally, no interest. He’s like Vincent (John Travolta) and Jules (Samuel L. Jackson), the pair of hitmen in Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction (1994) who, once they see the light of how small their role is in the grand scheme of things — well, at least once Jules sees the light — retires. The Mechanic also predicts films like Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional (1994), George Armitage’s Grosse Pointe Blank (1997) and Anton Corbijn’s The American (2010). In all of them, the killers face the consequence of their actions however impartially those actions were undertaken. 

The allure of these pictures is that these sharks have a heart and it’s that weakness, their underlying humanity and their desire to be normal and loved, that is ultimately the means through which they are brought to justice. Vincent (Tom Cruise) of Michael Mann’s superlative Collateral (2010) is another of these professionals — a cold, calculated instrument who seems an exception to these assassins in that he doesn’t appear to be human at all. Yet Vincent meets his match in a resourceful cab driver Max (Jamie Foxx) who dreams enough of love and normalcy for the both of them. The purity of Max’s humanity fuels him to a physical victory. Vincent’s last words before his mortal wounding are “Max, I do this for a living.”

In Grosse Pointe Blank (1997), a film I adore unequivocally, John Cusack plays independent contractor Martin Blank who, upon reuniting with his high school sweetheart and attending a class reunion in which he’s first to contemplate the rest of his life, chooses domesticity in favor of gunning-for-hire. That the matters of the heart always supplant the matters of the pocketbook is perhaps the greatest wish-fulfillment fantasy these films provide. With Wick spinoff Ballerina looming along with the legions of unofficial spinoffs like Atomic Blonde (2017) and The Villainess (2017) already in the rearview, it seems safe to say the appetite for fantasies of consequences will remain unsated and evergreen. For me, I hope these films ultimately make people who are able to make a difference less reluctant to do so. It’s past time for the good guys to get back into the game. 

Walter Chaw is the Senior Film Critic for filmfreakcentral.net. His book on the films of Walter Hill, with introduction by James Ellroy, is now available.