Also rented (on iTunes) the South Korean action flick The Villainess, a movie of which I’m of two very contradictory minds.
You will not find a more intense, thrilling, and exciting action movie this year. The action scenes in this film – all 3 1/2 of them – are some of the most alive, chaotic, and mesmerizingly cool scenes I’ve seen in years. The camera just moves actively around the actors and the stunts, more chaotically than anything I’ve seen, but always keeping things intense and understandable. It’s got some shaky-cam, but that shaky-cam is NOT hiding anything. I had more disbelieving laugh-out-loud moments in this flick than anything I’ve seen in years.
The opening six minutes starts out first person as our hero burst into a building and takes out people left and right. It’s like the movie saw the hallway scenes in Oldboy, The Raid, and any number of Netflix Marvel movies and basically said, “Hold my beer”. It’s a fantastic scene followed up later by a great chase scene… three motorcyclists sword-fighting side-by-side down a narrow tunnel… and later an equally frenetic battle aboard a bus.
All three (and a half) action set pieces make this movie ALMOST worth watching. But that’s about twenty minutes of a two hour movie. The rest of the movie shares a lot of DNA with La Femme Nakita… our hero (the titular Villainess) is captured after her opening brawl and is turned into a government (?) assassin. Which is weird since she just took down a drug lab single-handedly. And that where things gets muddled. The movie includes a number of confusingly edited-in flashbacks, telling you the main characters backstory and motivation. But it’s not done well and is confusing… It had me wondering if the opening scene wasn’t meant to be a later scene..
Also not helping is the lack of charisma of the lead actress. Whether she’s been directed to have no emotion or if that’s her limit as an actor, I don’t know. But it’s hard to get into her story when she’s not giving anything back… except some great action scenes (and I’m not sure how of that was her first stunt doubles given how much editing and production those scenes probably went through).
So the movie isn’t completely unwatchable, but I got the sense I’d have gotten a lot more out of the experience just watching the cool parts on YouTube and skipping the humdrum drama and perplexing and confusing story. If you like your kung-fu action fast-paced and VERY bloody, there’s something to admire here. If you demand better storytelling, there’s plenty of other flicks to watch.
Score: 72