The final shootout in The Killer is one of the wildest, most over the top action scenes ever made. With no script, it was shot over 36 days, using tens of thousands of blank rounds and hundreds of blood squibs. John Woo dressed the henchmen in white shirts and white jumpsuits so the bright red squibs would really pop on camera.
Right in the middle of the gunfight, a statue of the Virgin Mary shatters and the audio snaps into the “Overture” from George Frideric Handel’s Messiah. This musical shift, conceived by editor David Wu, momentarily disrupts the relentless violence and imbues the scene with a sense of operatic tragedy and spiritual desecration.
It’s moments like these that make John Woo the greatest action director of all time.