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Critics Consensus: The Villainess offers enough pure kinetic thrills to satisfy genre enthusiasts -- and carve out a bloody niche for itself in modern Korean action cinema.
Critic Consensus: The Villainess offers enough pure kinetic thrills to satisfy genre enthusiasts -- and carve out a bloody niche for itself in modern Korean action cinema.
All Critics (80) | Top Critics (14) | Fresh (66) | Rotten (14)
"The Villainess" is little more than an action showcase, with way more scenes of turgid espionage than thrilling set pieces. It's for genre die-hards, not a general audience.
'The Long Kiss Goodnight', 'La Femme Nikita', 'Kill Bill'... this South Korean thriller owes a debt to many a great female-assassin thriller, and it's a fun ride for fans of the genre.
As the carnage mercilessly piles up, we begin to feel nothing. Perhaps that's the point, but it's hard not to want more.
There's a lot of cool knives on display here, but the people doing the stabbing don't really matter.
What is entirely new about The Villainess is that it marries its revenge scenario to a melodrama of maternal sacrifice, with the film's terrific star, Kim Ok-bin, suffering more than Joan Crawford ever did.
Jung shreds a simple story and then weaves the pieces into an intricate tapestry of flashbacks and pure-action scenes, with the individual strands often sewn together by pictorial rhymes.
You're frequently lost in between rapid edits and clumsy choreography that your eyes quickly begin to glaze over as you attempt to discern what going throughout this quote unquote mayhem.
Coming out swinging from the opening frames, writer/director Byung-gil Jung's The Villainess pistol-starts with a breathtaking first person action sequence... then proceeds to top itself repeatedly.
A much-needed shot in the arm in terms of action films, female-led films and South Korean cinema. I hope that actress Kim Ok-bin and director Jung Byung-gil will be appreciated for their efforts and move on to do more ambitious work.
The Villainess works best when it's not concerned with its plot and story and focusing on presenting intricately choreographed visceral action that builds to bloody crescendos.
The Villainess is an action film that simultaneously echoes the spirit of 90s Asian action movies, the cinema of Park Chan-wook and even Euro crime-thriller classics...and yet feels...contemporary in its unrelenting energy and aesthetic polish
Villainess is an ambitious whirlwind that just misses its target, but it's a helluva ride.
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