There's no denying The Villainess has some amazingly inventive and filmed action scenes liberally sprinkling its lengthy running time. Whether they are enough to justify the film's reputed 4 minute standing ovation when presented at the Cannes Film Festival, I'm not sure. The Point Break remake had some exciting action scenes and stunts too and yet they're aren't too many disputing the contention, that it was very much a dud of a film.
Speaking of remakes I'm kind of amazed there doesn't seem to be any formal acknowledgement or credit that The Villainess, like John Badham's 1993 The Assassin (also known as Point of No Return), is a remake of Luc Besson's 1990 film La Femme Nikita. There's simply no repudiating it. Badham's movie gave credit to Besson's and said it was a remake. But strangely writer/director of The Villainess, Jung Byung-gil said he was inspired by La Femme Nikita, whilst giving no onscreen credit (that I could see). In my little corner of the world that's what we generally call "ripping people off".
Any way if you know the plots to the previous films, you'll know the basic storyline of The Villainess. Namely, that a young woman is taken and trained by a shadowy facility associated with South Korea's intelligence agency, into being a sanctioned assassin. The differentiating feature with The Villainess, is the almost infuriatingly complicated back story we are given about Sook-hee, the woman concerned. It is made unnecessarily complex in the long first act, by excessive flash-backing, where we are even given flashbacks, within flashbacks. At times things become nearly incoherent. I actually breathed a sigh of relief during the second act, when Sook-hee goes outside the training school on her first mission and the narrative becomes for a time, more traditionally linear in style, with far less flash backs. Complicating matters further is that the 20 year old Sook-hee we see onscreen almost appears more dangerous than the older trained up Sook-hee we see later. In the somewhat absurd, but dazzlingly choreographed opening , she eliminates a whole rival gang on different storeys of a building, a la The Raid. Yet later, both her and an associate female assassin have trouble with a couple of dudes they're supposed to terminate. There are head-scratching inconsistencies like this right through The Villainess.
Kim Ok-vin in the lead role as Sook-hee is very good, as is her onscreen daughter, Eun-hye, played by Kim Yeon-woo, who is very appealing, as a cute 3-year old. Kim Seo-hyung as Kwon-sook, the head of the training school, also succeeds in a finely tuned ambiguous role, whereby we are never sure of where her loyalties ultimately lie.
The conclusion which follows another hideously kinetic, wholesale gang slaughter and freeway bike and bus chase, very reminiscent of that seen in The Matrix Reloaded, is both thrilling, yet still somewhat confusing, whilst leaving the door ajar for a possible sequel no doubt. To be honest I don't think I'd be interested in it, unless I could be guaranteed that Jung Byung-gil had improved upon his story-telling abilities.
