Review: "I Saw the Devil"
I missed Ji-woon Kim's excellent Korean-made The Good, The Bad, The Weird, a colorful and kinetic homage to spaghetti Westerns, at Fantastic Fest a couple of years back and was forced to catch it later in its limited art house release when it rolled through Denver. Pretty impressive stuff, and Kim showed enormous flair and style. So, when I was sat down for the first Secret Screening of the 2010 incarnation of Fantastic Fest and found out that they were screening Kim's new flick I Saw the Devil, I was quite pleased. Alas, that feeling did not last long.
As most genre fans know by now, the Koreans really dig their vengeance movies, and the more brutal whup-assery there is, the better. I don't know a whole lot about their national psyche, but I can for damn sure say that I'm gonna be very careful never to offend anyone from Seoul, lest I end up on the wrong end of a hammer beat-down. Kim capitalizes here on this fetish for revenge, and ups the ante by playing it out in a reciprocal cycle, where the good guy gets his vengeance on the bad guy, who then gets his back on the good guy in turn, who is left with no choice but to come back for an escalated level of pain-dealing, and so forth, until ultimately there is scarcely any difference between hero and villain.
Min-sik Choi is a psycho killer who opens the film by kidnapping a woman and hacking her to pieces at his leisure in his secret lair, because that's what he does. Unfortunately for him, she was the girlfriend of Byung-hun Lee, a secret service agent who manages to track down the murderer fairly quickly. But Lee's grief-driven lust for vengeance cannot possibly be satisfied with a mere arrest of the criminal--he has to make Choi suffer first. Hence, he manages to surreptitiously tag Choi with a tracking device, so he can release him back into the wild, and then crash down upon him repeatedly with maximum force, unleashing a world of hurt. Naturally, though, Choi eventually figures out how he's being found again and again, and who it is that's hunting him, and contrives to turn the tables. And then, as is inevitable, the hunter becomes the hunted.
Technically, this is a competently executed movie and the lead performances are solid. However, when Choi resumes his killing spree roughly five minutes after Lee initially tags him and lets him flee, the viewer's sympathy for the alleged protagonist is quickly challenged. Especially since the lawman soon realizes what's going on, but doesn't put an end to his plan, even after he has to intervene again and narrowly save a female victim from being raped and murdered by Choi.
Indeed, horrific violence against women is a major theme of this movie. Just about all of the victims are female, and where the males usually are dispatched rapidly, the women are subjected to lingering terror, torture, and degradation. Certainly, horror and suspense movies are notorious for how often the female characters are brutalized, but Kim definitely lets the camera linger for a long time on their suffering here, and they can barely be considered characters--they're mere vehicles for disturbing voyeuristic impulses. While there's a perfunctory effort to show that at least three of them get away, as soon as they run off the edge of the screen the movie completely loses interest in them. Their getaways are the equivalent of watching the bad guys from COBRA parachute to safety right after the righteous G.I. Joes blast their jets to smithereens--you get to enjoy your guilty pleasure of watching exciting violence while being assured that gee, no one was killed, so it's all good.
Ultimately, the movie relentlessly pursues its theme of "To hunt the psycho, you must become a psycho" to a predictable end, one in which the hero's final justice brings no satisfaction to anyone, and actually ends up scarring innocent bystanders. I have nothing against bleak endings per se, but the motifs explored in I Saw the Devil are really nothing new, and the only thing it really has to offer is bone-snapping levels of naturalistic violence, Korean-style. Oh, and the lesson that the country is strangely awash in serial killers. Perhaps it's no wonder that so many people there are wandering around, seeking revenge.
As most genre fans know by now, the Koreans really dig their vengeance movies, and the more brutal whup-assery there is, the better. I don't know a whole lot about their national psyche, but I can for damn sure say that I'm gonna be very careful never to offend anyone from Seoul, lest I end up on the wrong end of a hammer beat-down. Kim capitalizes here on this fetish for revenge, and ups the ante by playing it out in a reciprocal cycle, where the good guy gets his vengeance on the bad guy, who then gets his back on the good guy in turn, who is left with no choice but to come back for an escalated level of pain-dealing, and so forth, until ultimately there is scarcely any difference between hero and villain.
Min-sik Choi is a psycho killer who opens the film by kidnapping a woman and hacking her to pieces at his leisure in his secret lair, because that's what he does. Unfortunately for him, she was the girlfriend of Byung-hun Lee, a secret service agent who manages to track down the murderer fairly quickly. But Lee's grief-driven lust for vengeance cannot possibly be satisfied with a mere arrest of the criminal--he has to make Choi suffer first. Hence, he manages to surreptitiously tag Choi with a tracking device, so he can release him back into the wild, and then crash down upon him repeatedly with maximum force, unleashing a world of hurt. Naturally, though, Choi eventually figures out how he's being found again and again, and who it is that's hunting him, and contrives to turn the tables. And then, as is inevitable, the hunter becomes the hunted.
Technically, this is a competently executed movie and the lead performances are solid. However, when Choi resumes his killing spree roughly five minutes after Lee initially tags him and lets him flee, the viewer's sympathy for the alleged protagonist is quickly challenged. Especially since the lawman soon realizes what's going on, but doesn't put an end to his plan, even after he has to intervene again and narrowly save a female victim from being raped and murdered by Choi.
Indeed, horrific violence against women is a major theme of this movie. Just about all of the victims are female, and where the males usually are dispatched rapidly, the women are subjected to lingering terror, torture, and degradation. Certainly, horror and suspense movies are notorious for how often the female characters are brutalized, but Kim definitely lets the camera linger for a long time on their suffering here, and they can barely be considered characters--they're mere vehicles for disturbing voyeuristic impulses. While there's a perfunctory effort to show that at least three of them get away, as soon as they run off the edge of the screen the movie completely loses interest in them. Their getaways are the equivalent of watching the bad guys from COBRA parachute to safety right after the righteous G.I. Joes blast their jets to smithereens--you get to enjoy your guilty pleasure of watching exciting violence while being assured that gee, no one was killed, so it's all good.
Ultimately, the movie relentlessly pursues its theme of "To hunt the psycho, you must become a psycho" to a predictable end, one in which the hero's final justice brings no satisfaction to anyone, and actually ends up scarring innocent bystanders. I have nothing against bleak endings per se, but the motifs explored in I Saw the Devil are really nothing new, and the only thing it really has to offer is bone-snapping levels of naturalistic violence, Korean-style. Oh, and the lesson that the country is strangely awash in serial killers. Perhaps it's no wonder that so many people there are wandering around, seeking revenge.
posted by Purukivel at 4:20 PM
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