Review: I Saw the Devil

Cop Byung-hun Lee is distraught when depraved serial killer Min-sik Choi adds the police sergeant’s fiancé to his list of victims. Rather than go through any normal or accepted grieving process, our good policeman has other ideas. He tracks the killer down, beats him within an inch of his life and...let’s him go. Then he follows him, picks him up again and repeats the process, and so on. After a while, the line between good and evil, cop and killer become seriously blurred as Byung-hun Lee allows Min-sik Choi to continue his killing spree in the pursuit of his own warped sense of revenge/justice. This little sicko game seems to only encourage Min-sik Choi to play along, and eventually turn things back against the grieving cop.

This dour 2010 South Korean thriller/vigilante film from co-writer/director Kim Jee-won (the interesting “A Tale of Two Sisters” and the bizarro “The Quiet Family”) wastes a fascinating killer played brilliantly by “Oldboy” star Min-sik Choi with an increasingly stupid script by the director and Park Hoon Jung. Not only do they make the killer seem increasingly too bumbling, but watching Byung-hun Lee (and his ridiculous ‘Lego Hair’) do what he does to the killer becomes repetitive, stupid, and frankly, morally repugnant. Why would a respected cop (grieving or not) just continually beat the killer up, let him go, and repeat the process again and again? Why not just kill him? It’s not like he’s giving him a taste of his own medicine, that’s not what the killer does. It’s stupid and repugnant because he’s allowing the killer to continue his handiwork. It makes you hate the cop almost as much as the killer, and is only a cat and mouse game if the cat swallows the mouse, continually poops it out and starts the chase again. The twist is somewhat original, but it goes from serial killer flick to vigilante flick/torture porn after too short a while to be believable. Yes, he has motivation, but in my opinion he also needs to be predisposed to such violence in the first place, and from what we see, he’s a dutiful officer, somewhat clean-cut. I didn’t buy it. The finale is predictable, and at the end of it I just didn’t get the point of all this. It was frankly distasteful and just not very well scripted.

The serial killer is fascinating as played by the completely dead-eyed Min-sik Choi in an excellent performance. It’s in this character and performance that the kernel of something interesting exists, but the rest is pretty amoral. I will say, though that the direction goes some way to covering up screenplay issues, if not enough. It’s a stylish-looking film, if almost borderline Wong Kar-Wai (“Chungking Express”) artsy pretentiousness with that falling snow and such. Great shot composition in particular.

Pretty violent (and viscerally violent- that crotch smash looked excruciating!), and a cannibalism subplot will make sure this one’s for a specialised audience to say the least (though some critics have praised it).

The first half has its moments, it’s a good looking film, and the serial killer is creepy, but this is a vile, pointless, and repugnant film. Watch “Dexter” instead, which is far more effectively ambiguous and unconventional and features a more believably sociopathic protagonist.

Rating: C