I Saw The Devil
Time Out rating:
<strong>Rating: </strong>2/5
Time Out says
Tue Apr 26 2011
Korean revenge movies reached their apotheosis with Park Chan-wook’s violent but sophisticated trilogy – ‘Sympathy for Mr Vengeance’, ‘Old Boy’ and ‘Sympathy for Lady Vengeance’ – the last two of which starred Choi Min-sik. In director Kim Jee-woon’s monotonously brutal cat-and-mouse movie, Choi plays Kyung-chul, an amoral serial killer who abducts and butchers the pregnant wife of special agent Soo-hyeon (Lee Byung-hyun). Consumed by revenge, Soo-hyeon initiates an interminable game of catch-and-release, repeatedly capturing and maiming his prey, but refusing to kill him until the ‘most painful moment’.A remorseless catalogue of calculated violence, casual cannibalism and sexual sadism, this inflicts over two hours of suffering on the audience – a cruelty compounded by the fact that its banal point is made early: per Nietzsche’s dictum, ‘He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster.’ Choi’s ferociously deranged performance eclipses that of handsome Lee, as does Choi Moo-seong’s, as Tae-ju, the seedy hotel owner with a taste for human flesh.
Author: Nigel Floyd
Release details
UK release:
Fri Apr 29, 2011
Duration:
138 mins
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