“Let me show you what you’ve made me into.”

Justin’s rating: It slices! It dices! It bores!

Justin’s review: When you’ve been bitten by the John Wick bug and need an ever-increasing amount of revenge flicks starring hyper-competent killers, you might want to cast further afield. Say, across the Pacific and to Korea, where film studios cough up these kinds of experiences before they have their breakfast in the morning.

The Villainess kicks off with a hyperactive, five-minute, first-person perspective fight through a building where our unseen hero shoots, kicks, and stabs something like 70 people to death. We only see her — Sook-hee is her name — when a bad guy picks her up and smashes her head-first into a mirror, changing the camera perspective.

Sook-hee, it turns out, is a highly trained assassin who’s trying to escape her past life. We get to see her past training, La Femme Nikita-style, as her considerable natural talents are further molded into an unstoppable killer. But this is inter-spliced with very little context with her current training by a different agency, and at this point I’m kind of lost but hoping that she’ll get back on that murder horse sooner or later.

The leverage that the first place — the “Zoo” — has over Sook-hee is her baby and the promise of absolute freedom after 10 years of service. And she sort of falls for her handler, because dating opportunities are hard in an all-female school of psychopaths.

As cool as the fights are in The Villainess, I quickly grew annoyed and confused with the story. As in, I had no idea what was happening outside of a general outline. This is in part thanks to the language barrier, the many girls in this film who look alike, and the frequent time jumps between different threads.

It’s a shallow movie that takes what should be a straight-forward revenging tale and chops it and twists it to seem deeper than it is. It’s pretentious, and Justin doesn’t respect that. As long as he’s talking in the third person, Justin also feels that this movie is really in love with its bloody effects in an unhealthy way that seems to be a fixture of Korean cinema.

Perhaps the most interesting bit of trivia AND scene is an in-your-face katana fight between motorcyclists — a bit that inspired the same in John Wick 3.

Yet because I couldn’t connect with the story of Sook-hee (or follow it half the time), I never found myself that engaged with The Villaness. It’s flashy and gory, to be sure, but there’s no emotion or personality behind any of it.

Intermission!

• Starting off in a first-person hallway fight to the death is one way of getting your audience’s attention
• Wearing face masks do not prevent you from being cut open
• Barbells to the shins is the most wince-inducing part of this opening
• Cops love to stand motionless in the pouring rain pointing their guns while the hero looks all cool
• Holding your breath for six minutes can come in handy
• Random ballet room!
• Random theater room!
• Getting shot in mid-air can shove you back and down into a dumpster
• OK that little girl is a total cutie-pie