I Saw the Devil

This is a brutal film. Pipes, chairs, broken glass, rope, all appear sticking through someone's body parts. Beatings, rape, Coen-esque evil, severed limbs, are all present. And yet it is all stylized, it's all pretty entertaining. The start of the film is probably the best part of it. In the first twenty minutes, a young secret agent talks to his girlfriend, who has a flat tire in the snow and is waiting for the tow truck. He sings her a song, she seems happy and bites back her tongue from telling him she's pregnant. And then horror. In a car with two lights at the front that look like wings, evil flies down to her car. The boyfriend gets off the phone, the man in the car comes up to the girl. She's beaten, raped, sliced up into pieces. It's horrific, and beautifully filmed with lush contrast between an array of colors. This is the set up for what is essentially a revenge thriller as the boyfriend played by Byung-hun Lee stalks and tortures the killer of his pregnant girlfriend. It's thrilling. The action sequences are very well done, and the lush colors are omnipresent. The only cringe that comes about is not to the disgusting actions within the film, but the fact that the boyfriend allows them to keep happening so that he can keep torturing the killer (who is played by OLDBOY's Min-sik Choi). The film does become aware of this, but late in the film, which is 2 and a half hours long. The ending is great, and so is the beginning, but the middle is practically intermittently exciting and occasionally barf-bag warranting. I SAW THE DEVIL is a good film, but at a shorter, crisper length it could have been much better.
I Saw the Devil: ★★★