Film · 1989 · Films · 1980s
The Killer
Scored from 196 calibrated IMDb reviewers, each re-centered on their own rating baseline before the title is ranked. Cohort: Films · 1980s (3,141 peers).
Summary
Ah Jong is a Hong Kong assassin who accidentally blinds the nightclub singer Jennie with a muzzle flash during a shootout, then attaches himself to her without admitting who he is or what he did. Needing money for the corneal transplant that could restore her sight, he takes one last triad contract — and his employers decide he should not survive it. Inspector Li Ying hunts him through Kowloon and starts to recognise a code in the killer he cannot find in his own superiors, while Jong's handler Sydney Fung is squeezed from both sides. John Woo's heroic-bloodshed thriller pairs Chow Yun-fat and Danny Lee, staging its gunfights around churches, doves and slow motion.
Released in 1989, The Killer is an action, crime and drama film. The runtime is 110 minutes. It plays in Cantonese. Its country of origin is listed as Hong Kong. Its certificate is R.
3,140 other films from the 1980s form the cohort it is ranked inside. The calibrated figure is built from 196 reviewers whose rating history varies enough to place their own average. A broader pool of 208 reviewers with two or more reviews feeds the raw-average track instead.
How the score was built
We compare the reviewers of this title against every other title those same people reviewed. Each review is scored relative to the reviewer's own baseline — a 7/10 from a hard grader sits well above their average, while a 7/10 from a generous grader sits below theirs. Every reviewer then counts the same, so the result is a calibrated consensus rather than a raw average.
- Global percentile
- Where The Killer lands against every title we rank.
- In-cohort percentile
- The same comparison narrowed to its cohort — titles of the same format released in the same decade. A 1970s film is judged against 1970s films, not against last year's streaming series. Ranked against Films · 1980s (3,141 titles).
- AI-adjusted percentile
- The same reviewer-normalized score, corrected for how much confidence the sample supports: thin samples are pulled toward the corpus average. Each title keeps the share n / (n + 53) of its measured distance from the average, where n is its calibrated-reviewer count, and the result is ranked on the same scale as the global percentile.53 is the median sample size across everything we rank. Here n is 196.
Cohort: Films · 1980s
