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Kyung-chul (Min-sik Choi) in I Saw the Devil. |
By John Esther
In the latest film by South Korean director Jee-woon Kim (A Tale of Two Sisters) a violent predator named Kyung-chul (Min-sik Choi of Oldboy fame) is on the loose. A psychotically mean person who rapes and kills women at random, Kyung-chul makes the painful, very painful, mistake of taking the life of someone dear to Dae-hoon (Byung-hyun Lee), a topnotch special agent who cannot be beaten…physically.
After a rather quick and illegal search by the special agent, Dae-hoon finds Kyung-chul and it is payback time. Beating Kyung-chul nearly to death only to let him go again so he can prey on women, again, every time Kyung-chul has another victim in his hands, Dae-hoon comes in give him another beating. The women are glad to see the hero arrive not knowing he was listening for quite some time. They, too, become victims in his revenge, although not like they would have been had he not been around. But then again, he did let the killer go rather than turn him in.
Despite one’s anger at the cruelty inflicted by people such as Kyung-chul it becomes increasing transparent that Dae-hoon’s plans and motivations become as monstrous, certainly more irresponsible, than Kyung-chul’s evil.
A riveting 141-minute film, I Saw The Devil moves pretty fast through its storyline even if there is more than a few trope holes the size of a Quentin Tarantino movie (i.e. Pulp Fiction). Is the South Korean police force so incompetent it could not follow the bloody trails Kyung-chul leaves behind? And then there is the subplot with a cannibal friend of Kyung-chul’s where his abduct, torture and kill modus operandi that is so messy the code would be cracked in the first 15 minutes of Law & Order.
Yet I Saw the Devil does have many attributes including smashing performances (does anyone play crazy better than Choi?), quite a few dazzling scenes of horrific violence and the film punctuates itself with a macabre humor that makes it easy to say “better the devil than me.”
