... but maybe I was looking in the mirror. This tale of cat-and-mouse revenge between a serial killer and a special agent whose fiancée was one of the victims plays out like male fantasy. One of the things it tries to show is that the overriding desire for revenge and bloodlust perverts the morality of the agent, but I don't think it probes this in a particularly deep way, which is unfortunate. It also gets in a few jabs of the ineptitude of the police (a head being fumbled out of a box comes to mind), but these punches are few and far between. Instead the focus is more on grisly torture, dismembering bodies, cannibalism, beheading, and various other forms of cruelty, so if you watch it, brace yourself. The action rarely lets up and it's engaging for all of its 141 minutes, I'll give it that. The performances from the two leads, Choi Min-sik and Lee Byung-hun, are strong, and director Kim Jee-woon tells the story with a certain flair. What keeps it from being great is that its story is too simple and its characters are too undeveloped. It seemed like it wanted it both ways - to revel in the violence and to be cautionary about how violence begets violence - and I think it ended up doing more of the former.
Review of I Saw the Devil
