'I Saw the Devil' review

Kim In-seo (Credit: Magnet)

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Soulless serial killer Kyung-chul (Min-sik Choi, the star of “Old Boy”) chooses the wrong victim when he kills the young fiancée of elite special agent Dae-hoon (Byung-hyun Lee of “The Good, the Bad and the Weird”). Now Dae-hoon will stop at nothing until he gets revenge, and he’s constructed a merciless game of cat and mouse to make sure that vengeance is as slow and painful as possible.

The verdict: The latest from Korean genre-hopper Jee-woon Kim (who directed the horror film “A Tale of Two Sisters” and the western “The Good, the Bad and the Weird”) supplies the kind of visceral thrills crime fans crave with just enough intellectual distance to please highbrow cult mavens. But look past the surface panache and “Devil” proves rotten at the core. The mano-a-mano battle between killer and cop leaves no room or regard for women, who are represented exclusively as one dimensional victims to be tortured, abused and avenged. Meanwhile, the killer comes off as an engaging anti-hero—clearly psychotic but tailor-made for fanboy worship. After a barrage of chases, fight scenes and graphic violence intended to delight and excite the audience, “Devil” does its conscientious duty to deliver a message about the spiritual toll of revenge. Too bad the hypocritical and hyperbolic action mayhem Kim orchestrates is no match for the level of relentless moral probing in the similarly-themed and vastly superior French Canadian thriller “7 Days.”

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