Berlin Review: Byun Sung-hyun’s ‘Kill Boksoon’
deadline.comMost big Korean action movies are backloaded, wrapping up with three to five endings, but Byun Sung-hyun’s Kill Boksoon, which premiered as a Berlinale Special, has everything going on up front.
So much so that it initially seems too much, to the extent that it sometimes feels as though there’s actually a mini-series in there bursting to get out.
Surprisingly, that’s not such a crazy idea, since, once you get past the far-fetched premise—an underground network of professional contract killers, presided over the glossy conglomerate MK Ent—there’s a lot of rich character work to supplement the superbly choregraphed violence that we’ve come to expect from the region.
The title might seem like an order, like Get Carter or (more likely) Kill Bill, but in actual fact it is the nickname given to Gil Boksoon (Jeon Do-yeon), a well-to-do single mother who poses as an events planner but is actually the most feared assassin on MK’s books.
Read more on deadline.com
