There’s something immediately appealing about the one-vs-many revenge flick. Give us a gruff, competent protagonist who wants the bad guy’s head on a spike (probably for shooting a dog or kidnapping a daughter), and let them work their way through henchmen armed only with a hammer and a silenced pistol. Pit them against an organised crime ring, starting with the small-scale before defeating the head honcho in their penthouse suite. It’s all we need to put a dumb smile on our face.
It’s a genre with a clear recipe, and John Wick has been dining out on it for four iterations now. Liam Neeson must have a patent filed for it. In fact, plenty of our favourite movies are in the genre: there’s Old Boy, Payback, Atomic Blonde, and the list goes on. It’s not a recipe that needs much deviation, and The Killer sticks to it like a limpet. The end result is a hard-boiled revenge thriller that keeps pushing our dumb smile button.
The plot is basically the same as Taken, but with the jigsaw pieces shuffled about. Bang Ui Gang (Jang Hyuk) is a hitman who has effectively retired and settled down with his wife, Hyeon-soo. His wife makes a request that would have got an immediate ‘no way’ from us, but we’re possibly a worse partner than he is. She is going on holiday with a friend, and that friend wants Bang Ui Gang to babysit her daughter while she is away. This request is made moments before they all swan off on holiday. Would you say yes? We’d be livid.
Regardless, Ui Gang agrees, and he’s left with a precocious teenager, Kim Yoon-ji (Seo-young Lee), who would rather not spend time with a stuffy adult that she barely knows. That works for Bang, who has better things to do. So, she is given the A-okay to stay with friends and spend as little time with Ui Gang as possible.
You can probably see where this is going. Kim gets kidnapped into a sex-trafficking ring, which is where the Taken synapses start firing. Ui Gang snaps back into hitman mode, and follows her trail. In his wake, he leaves dozens of dead bodies with confused looks on their faces. None of them expected a family member quite as competent and deadly as Ui Gang.
There’s no getting around how formulaic this feels, particularly on paper. The closest that The Killer gets to disrupting the formula is that Ui Gang achieves his objective relatively early on, only for plot undulations to make it a hollow victory. But for the most part this is entirely predictable: Ui Gang follows clue after clue, moving from lackeys to sub-bosses to big bosses.
But The Killer gets by through sheer style and glorious violence. John Wick fans take note: if you can’t wait for the fourth film to arrive onto the Xbox Store, but have a hankering for a similar take on a revenge-sploitation movie (yeah, that’s not rolling off the tongue), then you will in no way regret renting The Killer.
It certainly shares similar cinematography. Most of The Killer takes place at night, and South Korea shimmers and glows with neon. It’s a beautiful movie, capturing the country’s underbelly and almost making it seem appealing.
But it’s in the fight scenes where The Killer sings. If you’re like us and bemoan the death of the long, single-take action sequence, then you will love the action here. Jang Hyuk performs his own stunts, and they never seem to end. Protracted battles take place in long corridors (Old Boy fans will get a kick out of the similarity), office parking lots and kitchens. And there is a The Raid-like authenticity, as every punch, shot, stab and explosion is felt bodily. We oofed and moaned with so many of the punches in The Killer.
The caveat is a lack of emotional weight. Ui Gang is closed off to the point of being impenetrable. There are some nice moments when he lets his guard down with an old gun-running friend, but mostly he is a cold, emotionless hitman. The Killer almost gets away with it, because a revenge movie is often about unleashing a stone-cold killer and watching them do their thing. But Ui Gang’s lack of any weaknesses or emotional ties meant that we never truly felt like there were high stakes, nor did we make any connection with anyone. The plot became a vehicle that was driving us to the next action sequence, but the drive itself didn’t really have its own merit. Which was a shame – but not so much of a shame that The Killer gets derailed.
But you have every right to say ‘who cares’, because who needs emotional stakes and three-dimensional characters when the action is this bloody and relentless? The Killer believes that jump-cuts are for the weak, and thrusts a camera into bone-shuddering fights that would make Old Boy and John Wick wince.
They say that revenge is a dish best-served cold, but in The Killer, it’s effortlessly cool.
You can watch The Killer from the Film & TV section of the Xbox Store
