Korean cinema has been the most cutting edge and exciting exponent of action thrillers tinged with horror for the past 15 years or so, and I'm a big fan. You have to look far and wide for a very long time to find movies as deliriously twisted yet compelling as 'I Saw The Devil', 'Oldboy' or 'The Chaser'.
So I was very disappointed to find a film that sounds as good on paper as 'The Villainess' turn out to be such a hectic, empty mess. The script is just plain awful, with every single character behaving in ways that make no sense and changing wildly in nature and motivation from one scene to the next. Characters appear, fall in love, get married and burst into flames in what seems like seconds, so there's barely enough time to remember if the person on the screen dying is the same person that had a line a few scenes back, let alone be deeply moved, which would seem to be the intended goal.
The 'villainess' herself is just a bland, confusing and completely unbelievable maelstrom of stony-faced killer and fragile weeping rose, and the fact that she is played by two different actresses makes the whole thing even more bewildering and hard to keep track of than it would have been anyway. No explanation is given for the title of the movie, or, for that matter, anything she does.
I will grant you the 'Hardcore Henry'-like opening scene is *technically* impressive, but as meaningful and involving as looking up from your phone to watch someone else play a first person shooter video game for a few minutes. There's no context to the violence, or real-world believability, so it's basically just a bunch of paper targets shaped like people falling over. There are a couple of other action set pieces that are advanced enough to make you wonder how they were done, but not enough to make you care why anyone was doing it, or what the outcome would end up being.
By the end I was simply laughing at the deaths of characters I was apparently supposed to be heartbroken over, simply because so little effort had been put into making one care for them.
I don't know who the hell signed off on this, who let a script so bloated with flaws through the net, but it really worries me to think they thought the bar in cinema was so low right now that no-one would notice. Anyway, 'The Villainess' is the most boring film I've sat through in years.
So I was very disappointed to find a film that sounds as good on paper as 'The Villainess' turn out to be such a hectic, empty mess. The script is just plain awful, with every single character behaving in ways that make no sense and changing wildly in nature and motivation from one scene to the next. Characters appear, fall in love, get married and burst into flames in what seems like seconds, so there's barely enough time to remember if the person on the screen dying is the same person that had a line a few scenes back, let alone be deeply moved, which would seem to be the intended goal.
The 'villainess' herself is just a bland, confusing and completely unbelievable maelstrom of stony-faced killer and fragile weeping rose, and the fact that she is played by two different actresses makes the whole thing even more bewildering and hard to keep track of than it would have been anyway. No explanation is given for the title of the movie, or, for that matter, anything she does.
I will grant you the 'Hardcore Henry'-like opening scene is *technically* impressive, but as meaningful and involving as looking up from your phone to watch someone else play a first person shooter video game for a few minutes. There's no context to the violence, or real-world believability, so it's basically just a bunch of paper targets shaped like people falling over. There are a couple of other action set pieces that are advanced enough to make you wonder how they were done, but not enough to make you care why anyone was doing it, or what the outcome would end up being.
By the end I was simply laughing at the deaths of characters I was apparently supposed to be heartbroken over, simply because so little effort had been put into making one care for them.
I don't know who the hell signed off on this, who let a script so bloated with flaws through the net, but it really worries me to think they thought the bar in cinema was so low right now that no-one would notice. Anyway, 'The Villainess' is the most boring film I've sat through in years.