Review: Kim Ok-vin is ‘The Villainess’ in this deliriously violent Korean action-thriller

“The Villainess,” an insanely over-cranked action-thriller from the South Korean director Jung Byung-gil, begins with the sort of sequence that seems designed to clear most of the theater, until only those with cast-iron stomachs remain.

With little fanfare and even less context, the film thrusts us into the shoes of a deadly assassin named Sook-hee (Kim Ok-vin) as she shoots and slashes her way through what seems to be an entire building’s worth of armed-to-the-teeth thugs, a brutal revenge mission that sends blood gushing and broken glass flying in every direction.

The intensely subjective point of view and squish-squish sound effects lend the carnage a terrible first-person intimacy, strengthened by the fact that the sequence was shot to resemble a single take (any cuts here are strictly of the knife-induced variety). All that visual gimmickry aside, the sequence may remind you of the ax-in-the-hallway fight scene from Park Chan-wook’s notorious 2004 cult hit, “Oldboy,” which, I suppose, makes this movie “Oldgirl.” Or better yet, “La Femme Sook-hee,” as Jung has acknowledged the heavy influence of Luc Besson’s “Nikita” on this tale of a butt-kicking anti-heroine forced to serve the government agency that created her.

We see that creation story once Sook-hee ends her rampage (for the moment) and is taken into custody by Korean intelligence, at which point the camera relaxes slightly and assumes a more traditional, omniscient point of view. But it stays close to Sook-hee as she undergoes a bit of plastic surgery and some lethal vocational training from a steely female handler named Chief Kwon (the formidable Kim Seo-hyung), who tells her that, if she does the government’s bidding faithfully and without questioning, she will be released in 10 years’ time.

Sook-hee has no real choice but to comply, especially since she has recently given birth to a daughter, Eun-hye (Kim Yeon-woo), and wants her to have as normal an upbringing as she can. The identity of Eun-hye’s father turns out to be intimately linked to the reasons Sook-hee shot up that building in the first place — reasons that will be clarified, sort of, in a dense tangle of flashbacks, the story toggling feverishly between Sook-hee’s deeply traumatic past and her equally harrowing present.

The action highlights of “The Villainess” are doubtless soon headed to a YouTube channel near you, if they aren’t there already: a fight set aboard a city bus, a three-way swordfight on motorcycles and various other moments of inventive, adrenaline-pumping kinesis. The best, most surreal scenes follow Sook-hee’s training at a secret compound, a kind of homicidal Hogwarts, where she and several other female assassins-in-training not only hone their deadly arts but also learn practical skills that will help them blend in with civilian society.

That still leaves much of the story’s middle act, and while I’m generally inclined to applaud an action movie that seeks to be more than just an exercise in carnage, “The Villainess” turns wearyingly stop-and-go whenever it tries to fill in the void of its protagonist’s emotional and psychological history. Jung, who previously directed the 2012 serial-killer flick “Confession of Murder,” has a brutally effective way with action, but his attempts at character-driven storytelling (he co-wrote the script with Jung Byeong-sik) are nowhere near as well served by the same kind of calculated, mechanized efficiency.

It may be the strongest vindication of the movie’s feminist credentials that while Sook-hee’s interactions with her female rivals and colleagues are fascinatingly charged with emotion, her scenes with the male characters are almost uniformly dull. A shame, really, that there are so many of them: We get grisly flashbacks to her childhood with her criminal father, as well as a romantic triangle of sorts involving Joong-sang (Shin Ha-kyun), the gangster who was once Sook-hee’s mentor and lover, and Hyun-soo (Bang Sung-jun), the fresh-faced new neighbor she falls for not long after settling into her latest life of crime.

Best known for her performance in Park’s 2009 vampire thriller, “Thirst,” Kim Ok-vin is no stranger to having her beautiful face splattered with blood, and she gamely submits herself to this punishing physical gantlet as if it were no more taxing than a CrossFit routine. Getting you to care about this glamorous cipher may be beyond even this actress’ estimable talents, but few stars could wield a sword, a dagger or a battle ax with as much conviction, or look better doing it. At one point, her character is ordered to eliminate a high-profile target mere minutes before her own wedding ceremony, granting us the surreally memorable image of Sook-hee hoisting a sniper rifle in a banquet-hall bathroom, a murderess in matrimonial white.

By this point, “The Villainess” has become such a delirious welter of action-cinema allusions that the explicit reference to “Kill Bill” registers only fleetingly. My thoughts returned to Quentin Tarantino’s revenge saga more forcefully, and troublingly, in the movie’s surprisingly numerous scenes of children (none more heartrendingly cherubic than Eun-hye) being forced to witness the horrors of their parents’ spectacularly dismal career choices. You may be relieved, amid all this coldly virtuosic spectacle, to feel something at long last, even if what you mainly feel is revulsion.

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‘The Villainess’

Not rated

In Korean with English subtitles

Running time: 2 hours, 9 minutes

Playing: AMC Dine-In Sunset 5, West Hollywood

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