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Woo came to The Killer with a diversified background in Hong Kong filmmaking. In addition to John Woo's apprenticeship with Chang Cheh, he had worked as a contract director for Golden Harvest. Woo's career had taken a downturn by the mid-1980s due to a series of unsuccessfully realized comedies. One of the reasons for the film's Western success may be its increased stylization relative to A Better Tomorrow; The Killer foregrounds allusions to European and Hollywood filmmaking in ways that the former film did not. Its conscious allusion to Melville as inspiration would also tend to generate interest in Western cinephile circles. The general tone and texture of The Killer fit more closely with the noir tradition than does A Better Tomorrow, which borrows more specifically from melodrama and the Hollywood gangster genre.

This chapter focuses on Kim Je-Woon's A Bittersweet Life, a film which diverges from gangster films' conventional fixation with honor codes and sentimental displays of staunch masculinist camaraderie and offers, in their stead, a highly stylized cinematic poetics centered on a solitary city wandering. The film's cinematic city is the site of trauma, and in its stylistically disposed fantasy world, the hero stands alone, linking this film more with classic noir than the gangster genre.

Most scholars and critics have generally seen film noir as an American genre, emphasizing the fact that noir films have hailed from the classic Hollywood industry, or in the case of neo-noir, from the post-classical Hollywood cinema. Essentially, the perspectives of these scholars focus on the American contexts surrounding the films. This chapter examines films noir produced by two major film industries in Asia, the Hong Kong and South Korean cinemas which have been the most prolific in fashioning and transforming the noir tendency for their respective Asian contexts. The chapter sets out to understand the contexts of these motion pictures including detective and gangster genre films produced over the last ten years or so. The chapter thus follows the imperative on contextuality established in American scholarship of noir. Film noir in the Asian contexts (a darker than dark sensibility and an overwhelming urge towards violence) may be seen as alternative reactions to the American contexts of noir criticism.