Jung Byung-gil
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Connections, in both directions
In a nod to the French classic “La Femme Nikita,” Jung clearly wants to make both an action film and a complex character study, but the flashbacks turn out to be bullet duds that don’t add any dimension to Sook-hee.
(There are more than a few shades of Luc Besson’s classic La Femme Nikita here, and Jung makes sure to reference one of that film’s more memorable scenes, when Sook-hee must interrupt a romantic moment by going into a bathroom, assembling a sniper rifle and taking a shot at her assigned target.)
After that, The Villainess, which is nothing is not eagerly derivative, toggles over to La Femme Nikita mode.
In this schizophrenic thriller, Luc Besson’s 1990 noir classic La femme Nikita gets yet another makeover via the story of a beautiful girl trained to kill.
With its swarming squads of black-suited assassins, its overload of guns, swords and corpses, and its cold-eyed killer women, his movie blithely recalls such earlier revenge thrillers as the Kill Bills, the John Wicks (already a part of the international action pantheon), and La Femme Nikita, with maybe a faint whiff of the old Japanese "Baby Cart" pictures as well (little kids make several intrusions here).
Channeling “La femme Nikita,” “Kill Bill,” Nikkatsu’s ’70s female exploitation films and a gazillion Hong Kong martial arts heroines, “ The Villainess ” nonetheless succeeds in being one-of-a-kind for its delirious action choreography and overall narrative dementia.
Kill Bill: Vol. 1 (2003)
Directed by Quentin Tarantino
influenced The Villainess (2017)
Visuals Themes Plot
Think Oldboy‘s hallway scene from the first-person perspective of Hardcore Henry spilling over through a non-descript doorway into a wide-open setting for a one-on-twenty bloodbath a la Kill Bill‘s House of Blue Leaves sequence.
This is a scene that could have existed in any female-centric vigilante flick such as Nikita or Kill Bill , and both films are heavy inspirations for the story of The Villainess (which is described later in this review), but that doesn’t matter so much because the strengths of the film are within the execution of these action sequences.
With its swarming squads of black-suited assassins, its overload of guns, swords and corpses, and its cold-eyed killer women, his movie blithely recalls such earlier revenge thrillers as the Kill Bills, the John Wicks (already a part of the international action pantheon), and La Femme Nikita, with maybe a faint whiff of the old Japanese "Baby Cart" pictures as well (little kids make several intrusions here).
Channeling “La femme Nikita,” “Kill Bill,” Nikkatsu’s ’70s female exploitation films and a gazillion Hong Kong martial arts heroines, “ The Villainess ” nonetheless succeeds in being one-of-a-kind for its delirious action choreography and overall narrative dementia.
While Sook-hee's eventually-revealed origin has echoes of Quentin Tarantino's Kill Bill (he basically apes the O-Ren Ishii story), the non-linear method he uses to tell it leaves us disconnected.
By this point, “The Villainess” has become such a delirious welter of action-cinema allusions that the explicit reference to “Kill Bill” registers only fleetingly.
John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum (2019)
Directed by Chad Stahelski
influenced by The Villainess (2017)
Visuals
There was also a motorcycle fight reminiscent of a similar scene in 2017’s female assassin film The Villainess and just as insane.
But once again Reeves proves he is nothing less than perfect as the title character, while Stahelski continues to cement himself as one of the great action directors working today (even if one motorcycle set piece does feel slightly lifted from 2017’s Korean hit The Villainess ), and if his remake of cult favorite Highlander ever gets made I guarantee I’ll be first in line to see it opening day.
In international cinema, seeing lots of practiced stunt work, unparalleled skills of martial arts and accomplished filmmaking without excessive CGI has been plentiful due to films such as Indonesia’s The Raid films (2011 and 2014), South Korea’s The Villainess (2017), Vietnam’s Furie (2019) and many others.
Think Oldboy‘s hallway scene from the first-person perspective of Hardcore Henry spilling over through a non-descript doorway into a wide-open setting for a one-on-twenty bloodbath a la Kill Bill‘s House of Blue Leaves sequence.
The Villainess gets off to an absolutely blistering start with a staggering shoot-em-up and slash-em-up sequence, that plays like the Oldboy hallway scene by way of Hardcore Henry , as we watch Ok-bin Kim’s assassin Sook-hee rack up a body count of around 40 in a hallway, a flight of stairs and in a gym, through her point of view.
The Villainess opens up utilizing a first-person POV as we watch an unseen assailant fileting, stabbing, shooting, and hacking their way through dozens of attackers awaiting them down a long corridor, undoubtedly a nod to a similar frenetic fight scene from Oldboy, in what’s meant to feel like a one-take sequence (I was only able to identify one cut, but that one was so well-hidden, there may be more).
Imagine the hallway fight from “Oldboy,” but three times as long and incalculably more violent (eek, another reference).
All that visual gimmickry aside, the sequence may remind you of the ax-in-the-hallway fight scene from Park Chan-wook’s notorious 2004 cult hit, “Oldboy,” which, I suppose, makes this movie “Oldgirl.”
Ever since Park Chan-Wook's bloody classic Oldboy, Korea has been on the literal cutting of the revenge movie genre.
Those sets slide between lurid decaying environments and slick opulent locales drenched in John Wick-inspired neon colours.
John Wick may have style, but The Villainess has nothing to lose.
With its swarming squads of black-suited assassins, its overload of guns, swords and corpses, and its cold-eyed killer women, his movie blithely recalls such earlier revenge thrillers as the Kill Bills, the John Wicks (already a part of the international action pantheon), and La Femme Nikita, with maybe a faint whiff of the old Japanese "Baby Cart" pictures as well (little kids make several intrusions here).
This place is nuts, like those weird Black Widow flashback sequences from The Avengers: Age of Ultron, mixed with a little bit of John Wick and a lot of Full Metal Jacket.
Director Jung Byung-gil was a stuntman, just like John Wick directors Chad Stahelski and David Leitch, and like them Jung has a meticulous fascination with the movement of bodies onscreen.
Sook-hee is immediately arrested and taken to prison, where she’s recruited for a top-secret government program of John Wick -esque complexity.
Throughout, The Villainess proves deeply indebted to the work of Park Chan-wook, be it the vicious intro (which plays like a steroidal variation on Oldboy ’s hammer hallway sequence), the story’s commingling of love, revenge and mania, or its fascination with mutating identity (not to mention that Kim Ok-vin starred in the director’s Thirst ).
Kim Ok-bin’s a great actress—go watch Thirst, now now now!—but Sook-hee’s a strangely remote character, and the most vivid flash of personality doesn’t arrive until the final moments.
Sook-hee signs up and is given all the usual training in the lethal arts, as well as a heavy overlay of plastic surgery (from which she emerges in the form of a new actress, Kim Ok-bin, star of the Park Chan-wook vampire flick Thirst).
Thanks to plastic surgery, Sook-hee is soon transformed into a lovely Kim Ok-bin (the female lead in Park Chan-wook’s Thirst.)
Kim Ok-bin , who spills even more blood here than she did in “Thirst,” stars as Sook-hee, who is eventually captured after her rampage and imprisoned in a mysterious underground facility.
This is also the perfect time to mention Park Chan-wook’s Thirst, one of his more underrated flicks, because Ok-bin gives another strong performance there, too, and I enjoyed how this role in The Villainess gave the actress some real opportunities to shine.
In its climax, The Villainess returns to the precision kickassery of its opening, as the camera – again in an impossibly sinuous single take – tracks an axe-wielding Sook-hee in her onslaught onto, through, and off a barrelling bus-load of villains, like an inverted Speed (1994).
Although the film premiered in the midnight section of the Cannes film festival and promptly sold U.S. rights to Well Go USA, sales company Contents Panda may find it hard to generate as much critical and commercial buzz as they did for “Train to Busan” when it bowed in the same section last year.
This is a film that prefers baroque flourishes to propulsive simplicity; it’s closer in that respect to Oldboy than, say, Train To Busan .
Like Jung’s earlier effort, The Villainess can trace its lineage to another Korean New Wave classic, Park’s 2005 film Lady Vengeance .
Kim Ok-vin, probably best known in the West for her role in Park’s Thirst , goes through the wringer as Sook-hee, a talented killer in the Lady Snowblood mode who first comes to the attention of the authorities when she single-handedly mows down an entire gang.
It synthesizes the zaniness of Looney Tunes and gags of Buster Keaton with martial-arts master classes that call back to the career of Jackie Chan and learn from more recent films like 2017’s South Korean action flick The Villainess .
This place is nuts, like those weird Black Widow flashback sequences from The Avengers: Age of Ultron, mixed with a little bit of John Wick and a lot of Full Metal Jacket.
Digitally stitched long-takes are no longer a novelty (filmmakers have spent the last decade trying to top Children of Men) and audiences are now more media savvy than ever before.
Thanks to such dazzling and deeply dark films as Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, Mother, and I Saw The Devil, South Korean thrillers make cinephiles worldwide drool in anticipation of stories as twisted and electrifying as they are gut-wrenching.
There are vehicular action sequences that showcase the work of a stunt, choreography, lighting and cinematography team, all impressively working in tandem, that’s of a caliber not seen since The Raid 2 .