The Villainess

2017 Korean action movie

Rating: 14/20

Plot: A female assassin kills a bunch of fellas.

After reading that the John Wick creators paid homage to this South Korean action flick with the third installment's sword-fight-on-motorcycles, I had to check this out. And that scene really is almost a carbon copy of the sword-fight-on-motorcycles in this movie. Just replace Kim Ok-bin with Keanu Reeves, and you've got the same scene.

That scene, like all the other action sequences in The Villainess, have an originality that makes this worth watching if you can handle all the blood and chaos and improbabilities. These characters' blood spurts more than in the Wick movies, and there are several instances when you wonder why somebody just doesn't shoot a certain character. However, as displays of action mayhem, this is right up there with anything. It all opens with a 7+ minute sequence that is mostly first-person where the titular character kills at a Weng Weng rate. If you've seen that Hardcore Henry movie, this opening sequence, as well as a few other action scenes that shift from first-person to third-person with ingenious camera dexterity, will remind you a lot of that. And it will make you wonder if you're watching somebody play a video game, the kind of thing that would easily turn off some viewers. Like a lot of the action sequences, including a very lengthy climactic one that involves public transportation, it has the appearance of something filmed in a single extended take, but I'm fairly sure it's all trickery.

The story is a little hard to follow, bouncing around out of sequence and never clearing mysteries up in a way that made it easy on the viewer. I liked the character fine even though she rarely seemed in control of what was going on, surprising once you see her in action in the first seven minutes. Eventually, the story weaves in a pair of love stories with all the assassin stuff and gives the movie a bit of heart.

Recommended for you Wick fans looking for something to satisfying your craving for that sort of thing while you wait for Chapter 4 of that franchise.