I Saw The Devil (2010)

Director – Kim Je-Woon
Writers – Hoon-jung Park
Production Company – Softbank Ventures,Showbox/Mediaplex, Peppermint & Company.
IMDB Page

I Saw the Devil has been in my newly formed Netflix queue for only a week or so, I’ve ready so many good reviews that I bumped it up to the top so I could watch it immediately.  I was not disappointed – it has some amazing characters in it like an inhuman serial killer, a cruel cannibal, and revenged determined Secret Agent.

 

The basic plot circles around Kim Soo-hyeon played by Byung-hun Lee who is brilliant playing a very methodical, emotional driven, stone cold all over your butt Secret Agent who is out for revenge.  Kim is out for revenge because his pregnant girlfriend’ who is also the daughter of the Police Chief, is brutally murdered while waiting for some help one night when her car broke down.

Min-sik Choi plays the other main character Kyung-chul, and man does he knock it out of the park as a brutal serial killer.  Kim is hushed, disciplined, and systematic and Kyung-chul is his complete opposite being thoughtless, unusual, and bold.

Kim decides to hunt Kyung-chul, and hunt he does.  Kim starts a very nice game of cat and mouse so that he can not only take revenge on Kyung-chul for his girlfriends’ murder, but so that he can also perhaps get some real emotion from Kyung-chul – I think nothing would feel better to Kim then to have Kyung plead for his life and beg for forgiveness..this is something that Kyung-chul is incapable of though.

Spoilers

Kim implants Kyung-chul with a tracking device so this is how he can keep track of the sick killer, Kim is always listening in and Kyung-chul even knowing he is being hunted boldly still finds new victims.  He’s sick, so this cat and mouse chase is mostly a new high for him, I think this hurts Kim greatly – seeing that his “revenge” is almost pleasure for Kyung-chul.

The scene – there is one scene with Kyung-chul is a car with two others that is shot so freaking fabulously I wish I could have been there to see how it was done.  It’s fast, bloody, and dazzling – very imaginative.  You’ll know it when you see it.

Now there’s a lot of Kim beat’s up Kyung-chul then releases him back into the world, but I think it’s methodically done so that you can see the determination of Kim to inflict physical and emotional pain but also so that you can see the Kyung-chul has no soul and that Kim will have to reach far beyond this type of revenge to force Kyung to feel anything.

At a certain point Kyung-chul takes full control of Kim’s game, let’s just say his depravity was underestimated and Jyung-chul inflicts even more pain on Kim – but as a viewer you will expect nothing less from him.  We have the pleasure of seeing Kyung-chul take some hits to his manhood via Kim but the displeasure of viewing the way these hits simply pump up Kyung-chul to try and sacrifice himself to deal a superior perfect blow to Kim…let’s just say it doesn’t quite go as planned.

Kim does take back the reigns at the end, and he even manages to find something pure from Kyung-chuls past to make a reappearance…and  in the end maybe this one thing that Kyung-chul cares about gets to take a last step in Kim’s revenge.

Great flick! This movie is pretty darn long but when you have such awesome characters I like to feel their pain and inter-workings, you need time to do this! I really enjoyed Kim Je-Woons work.  He’s made a fan of me and I’ll be looking forward to seeking out more of his work.