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kill-boksoon-review-header.jpg

'Kill Boksoon' Asks the Question: 'What If 'John Wick', But a Single Mom, and Not As Good?'

By Petr Navovy | Film | April 3, 2023 |

By Petr Navovy | Film | April 3, 2023 |


kill-boksoon-review-header.jpg

When you get a movie that combines hyper-stylistic flourishes, visceral action, and a captivating core of human drama-wow, is that a satisfying watch! If it was a cocktail, you could call it the Michael Mann. Action drama Kill Boksoon, from South Korean writer-director Sung-hyun Byun (Kingmaker), reads from the same ingredients sheet, but doesn’t quite manage to pull things off, serving up a finished product that delivers some effective thrills and moments of genuine pathos, but which overall is wildly uneven and feels far too long—a charge that couldn’t get leveled at a Michael Mann film (well, except for Public Enemies).

Kill Boksoon’s central narrative tension is summed up, in a somewhat on-the-nose fashion, partway through the film by its main character: ‘Killing other people is easier than raising a kid.’ Gil Boksoon is a killer-for-hire. A legendary one, feared and respected by her peers in the expansive, John Wick-ian underworld that she inhabits. Outside of that world, Boksoon is also a single, middle-aged mother, who provides bountifully for her teenage daughter when it comes to the material side of things, but who struggles keenly to overcome the emotional distance between the two. I suppose it wouldn’t be easy, slitting a throat one minute and then dicing up onions while making small talk with a tempestuous adolescent the next.

Jeon Do-yeon (Secret Sunshine) anchors the film with an impressive performance. Her physicality in the numerous fight sequences is raw and powerful, and she deftly communicates her character’s inner self throughout, revealing layers of personality and conflict often in just a glance. Her Boksoon isn’t just a cool, calculating hitman, a flat cartoon—this is a woman who gets frustrated, who lusts, who has trouble controlling her temper, and who has a little bit of an ego. She struggles with the realities of aging on the job, with raising her daughter, and with reconciling her past. Jeon Do-yeon is frequently nothing short of mesmerizing here.

It’s a shame, then, that the movie as a whole doesn’t fully live up to her. Its chief error lies in its pacing. After a strong, pulse-pounding opening featuring a Yakuza duel that immediately impresses upon us just how much of a force of nature Boksoon is, the film settles into a plodding worldbuilding that gradually bleeds away the majority of the investment that the first sequence generated. At two hours and seventeen minutes, as it is Kill Boksoon is far too long, and my interest didn’t pick up again until just after the halfway point. More economical storytelling would have benefited the film. This is an action movie after all; not everything has to be a conversation, stories can be told with action and blocking, bodies and flying objects.

When Kill Boksoon does work, it works very well. On top of Jeon Do-yeon’s hypnotic performance, there’s some real visual panache on show here. Katanas and axes glint in strobing train lights; violent slo-mo sequences play out as Boksoon’s preternatural instincts map out the trajectory of battle; balletic fights play out in their entirety in puddle reflections. About two-thirds of the way through the film, a multi-combatant brawl breaks out in a restaurant, splintering into two separate-yet-linked fights that take place on two sides of a thin dividing wall, the action on one side influencing the events on the other, the camera rotating nonstop around them both, tracking things in a delirious moment of confident filmmaking. The movie finds time for humor too, with the best examples woven into the action, reminiscent in one moment in particular of the great Stephen Chow. These elements are diluted, however, by the film’s lack of focus and attempts at sprawling mythology. Too much of the first half of the film is spent setting things up that, yes, do pay off in the second half, but which are not made interesting before that happens. Kill Boksoon has some interesting ingredients and hints of delicacy, but it lacks the main quality that all good cocktails must have: Balance.

(Kill Boksoon is out now on Netflix)