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How entertaining? ★★★★★
Thought provoking? ★★☆☆☆ 5 December 2010
This article is a review of I SAW THE DEVIL. |
"I will kill you when you are in the most pain. When you're in the most pain, shivering out of fear, then I will kill you. That's a real revenge. A real complete revenge," Kim Soo-hyeon
First off. Wow! I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t make my Top 10 by the end of the year. From Kim Jee-Woon, director of the quite frankly brilliant THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD, and starring Lee Byung-hun (A BITTERSWEET LIFE) and Choi Min-Sik (OLDBOY), this is the most violent picture I’ve seen this year. We watched the uncut version. Do not let that put you off, as there is a point to it. I SAW THE DEVIL is an intelligent and biting take on the revenge flick.
First off. Wow! I’ll be surprised if this doesn’t make my Top 10 by the end of the year. From Kim Jee-Woon, director of the quite frankly brilliant THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WEIRD, and starring Lee Byung-hun (A BITTERSWEET LIFE) and Choi Min-Sik (OLDBOY), this is the most violent picture I’ve seen this year. We watched the uncut version. Do not let that put you off, as there is a point to it. I SAW THE DEVIL is an intelligent and biting take on the revenge flick.
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Choi Min-Sik’s Kyung-chul is up there with Magua (from THE LAST OF THE MOHICANS) and The Tooth Fairy (from MANHUNTER) as one of the scariest bad guys of modern cinema. Kyung-chul is a sadist and serial killer, without it any ounce of mercy or morality. The film opens with him brutally killing a woman, who is the fiancé of Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun). Soo-hyun is a secret service agent and takes two weeks leave to track down her murderer. He quickly finds out the identity of Kyung-chul, but instead of dealing with him there and then, and/or turning him in, Soo-hyun takes a different tack – he decides to punish him slowly to make Kyung-chul suffer fear. It seems Kyung-chul won’t learn his lesson, and Soo-hyun does things like hamstring him (that is a particularly vivid scene to say the least!). This is up there with two best revenge films: OLDBOY and KILL BILL; but instead of going for the catharsis of just desserts, it is all the more intelligent and goes down the road of THE DARK KNIGHT and demonstrates the futility and hollowing out of vengeance, and the unplanned/unforeseen consequences.
The film has stayed me with me ever since I watched it. It is powerful and disturbing and interesting. The atmosphere is constantly tense as the stakes and desperation get higher. The set-pieces are stunning, for instance, after Soo-hyun has punished Kyung-chul for the first time, the latter manages to get a taxi in the middle of nowhere, and inside the car are two serial killers, and he takes them on with a broken wrist and a knife. (A couple in the audience walked out after that.) Kim Jee-woon shows with bravura how weird the true underbelly of society is. When this gets released this must surely be on your list to watch. The original Korean title is a translation of Nietzsche, BEYOND GOOD AND EVIL. The director said after the screening that the devil in the English-language title could be either of the leads, or the audience. You decide.
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