Review: The Villainess (Ak-Nyeo)
From its first second, The Villainess (Ak-Nyeo) brands itself as a banquet of nonstop deliriously demented carnage. Its seven-minute opening sequence, done through a subjective POV, features the titular character shooting, stabbing, strangling, and kicking seemingly neverending swarms of men in a meth lab. Even without its breathless and breathtaking prelude, Byung-gil Jung's sophomore directorial feature, would still rank as one of the best action thrillers in recent memory, so replete is it with nifty, edge-of-your-seat action set pieces.
Where there's clarity in the chaos, there's muddiness in the narrative, which is a jumble of La Femme Nikita, Kill Bill, and whatever else the screenwriters thought up to spackle the moments between the bloodlettings. The main character is Sook-hee (Ok-bin Kim) who, after her impressive rampage, is taken to a secret government training ground for assassins headed up by Chief Kwon (Seo-hyeong Kim). Initially raging against her new face and identity, Sook-hee eventually accepts her new fate once she learns that she is pregnant with her dead husband's child. Like the other women in the facility, she's trained not only in the ins and outs of killing people (not that she needs any more training) but also in a vocation (in this case, an actress) that she can use as cover once they let her out in the real world as a sleeper agent.
The filmmakers mess with chronology by skipping back and forth to convey that violence has always been a part of her life, whether as a child witnessing the death of her father, being raised by gangsters, or marrying her mentor Joong-sang (Ha-kyun Shin) only to have him murdered on their honeymoon. At least being a mother to her young child offers solace, as does the burgeoning romance with her neighbour Hyun-soo, played with winning shy awkwardness by Jun Sung. Except that Hyun-soo has been assigned by Chief Kwon to watch Sook-hee. Then there's also the fact that her husband might be very much alive.
To be honest, it's difficult to invest much care in the goings-on when the filmmakers are intent on rendering the narrative as incoherent as possible. It's not that a clear and concise narrative is essential - to wit: The Raid and any Fast and Furious flick - but if one is going to prioritise the adrenaline rush, then one would do well to streamline or at least keep the narrative strands untangled. Not that most viewers are likely to care, especially with sequences such as the jaw-dropping motorcycle chase that features a three-way samurai sword fight and Sook-hee hurling herself onto the back of a speeding bus to do battle with another horde of henchmen before the final showdown. Jung-hun Park's camera snakes and whips in and around the dynamic action choreography, often contorting itself into some how-did-it-do-that moves.
The Villainess (Ak-Nyeo)
Directed by: Byung-gil Jung
Written by: Byung-gil Jung, Beong-sik Jung
Starring: Ok-bin Kim, Ha-kyun Shin, Jun Sung, Seo-hyeong Kim
