‘I Saw the Devil’: Revenge fantasy from S. Korea goes way over the top

Published 12:01 am Friday, April 1, 2011

Herald Move Critic

Fans of Asian action cinema could be forgiven for assuming that Park Chan-wook’s “Vengeance Trilogy,” which included the mind-blowing “Oldboy,” was the last word in South Korean revenge pictures.

But in movies, there’s never a last word. And here comes Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil,” a wildly over-the-top revenge fantasy that makes its bloody case at an exhausting 141 minutes.

If you have a weak stomach, best sit this one out. It begins with a murder-torture sequence that sets the tone for the rest of the story.

The murder victim is the fiancee of a cop, played by Lee Byung-hun. He’s shattered over the loss, and vows to find the killer, outside official police duty.

The killer is played by Choi Min-sik, who gave an epic performance in “Oldboy.” Here he creates a true monster: a sarcastic, brutal psychopath who just doesn’t care.

The odd thing is the detective finds the killer’s identity in the first half hour of the movie. But he doesn’t want to arrest the guy, or even kill him quickly, vigilante-style. He wants him to suffer, over the course of days.

Movie-watchers know it is always a mistake to leave the bad guy alive, because he has a way of getting up off the ground and grabbing the nearest pickax or something. And the killer in “I Saw the Devil” is no amateur.

I’ll say this for director Kim Jee-woon: He knows something about moviemaking. He can go quiet (“A Tale of Two Sisters”) or he can go big (“The Good, the Bad and the Weird”), and he stages individual scenes with consummate care for details of design and composition.

I think his talent is in service of a pretty tired idea in “I Saw the Devil,” which is that revenge takes as big a toll on the avenger as it does on the target. In no way does the movie earn the tears of its final moments, given the obviousness of its point.

And in lingering with such authority over various acts of barbarism, Kim Jee-woon doesn’t exactly distance himself from the more sensational aspects of his story. This is a mixed-up movie, all right: made with great skill, but not in control of its moral.