jesse o
Not sure what to think about this film. It's not really a bad movie quite frankly, it's just one that doesn't really hold your interest that much. I did like that everything that happened in the film was all due to the main character losing his cell phone and falling in the hands of the wrong man. I did like that the villain in the film was really much more of a pushover and him finding the cellphone gives him an outlet to vent his frustrations about ungrateful costumers at his job, his mother being sick, etc. This is a man that lets everyone walk over him because he just doesn't have the courage to fight back. As he finds the cellphone, he thrives on the anonymity and, again, uses that to vent his frustrations. At the same time, I found the whole narrative, or arc, to be a little bit absurd. They go way over-the-top with this concept, it really is ridiculous by the end. There are also these subplots the main character and the villain have going on which play into the ending of the movie in the most convoluted manner and I was just not a fan of it, at all. There's also the fact that the climax of the film, you'll know when it starts, is really melodramatic. Not in the typical way I'm used to with Korean films, where they try to pull at your heartstrings with characters crying to a sad piano track in the background. The climax sees the "villain" getting fired from his job, which he needs in order to pay for his mother's operations, she has a brain tumor, the protagonist finds out his wife cheated on him with another man and is about to have a baby with him, this will be important in the last scene of the film. On top of which, the actors are pretty much completely overacting their way through this. They're definitely not trying to manipulate you into feeling sad, but the actors are crying their way through this climax like it's going out of style. And I, of course, was not a big fan of it. It turns out that the protagonist survived the events of the climax, and a cop tells him that his wife wasn't killed by the explosion that the villain caused, but was, in fact, strangled before the fact. The protagonist did this after finding out of his wife's affair and eventual child with the guy, whom he also put a hit on. So, as it turns out, the child was actually his from the start and not from the guy she had the affair with. So, in turn, he killed his wife and unborn child. I understand that it's probably a better ending, as it creates something for the character to deal with for the rest of his life. But it's also unnecessarily dark, like it's going out of its way to be dark and depressing. It doesn't feel like the next logical step of the story, it just feels like it was done just for the fuck of it. This film isn't bad, but it requires a lot o patience to get through, and even then it's not like the story is rewarding or anything. This movie isn't really worth watching, as Korea has a lot of better revenge thrillers than this. Just off the top off my head: I Saw the Devil, Bedevilled, Oldboy, The Yellow Sea, Lady Vengeance, Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, and so on and so forth.
Rated 2/5 Stars •
Rated 2 out of 5 stars
03/31/23
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