The pan-genre über-hack of the new Korean zeitgeist, Kim Jee-woon has been deft in some arenas: 2003's A Tale of Two Sisters suggests a nightmare endured inside a suffocating velvet pillowcase, while 2008's breathless The Good, the Bad, the Weird pioneered the fourth-gear lo-mein Western with such brio, you could feel Quentin Tarantino's zipper strain.
I Saw the Devil, which opens this weekend at the Coral Gables Art Cinema, doesn't lack for ambition--at nearly two and a half relentless hours, Kim's new film steals into the signature territory Park Chan-wook established, exhausted, and left for dead: the hyperbolic mega-revenge epic.
Oldboy's Choi Min-sik is Devil's shitstorm on legs, a bull-goose serial
killer with no psychopathology to speak of--hunted, tortured, and oddly
released over and over again by pretty-boy fed Lee Byung-hyun, whose
fiancée has been arbitrarily butchered. The I-have-become-what-I-beheld
dynamic is on the front burner, and in typical K-wave fashion, the duel
of wits and pain endurance stretches out to Sadean extremes.
Never
good with nuance, Kim is a beast with disarming imagery (like the
severed head that turns face-up in a river current) but has few
resonating ideas, leaving the domino-tumble of brutality to become its
own tiresome spectacle.
-- Michael Atkinson
Follow Cultist on Facebook and Twitter @CultistMiami
