Format: Streaming video from NetFlix on rockin’ flatscreen.
This is the fourth in a series of twelve movies suggested by Nick Jobe.
Last year in my set of 25 challenge movies, Chip Lary assigned me the film 3 Idiots, which I enjoyed. 3 Idiots, though, is a 3-hour film mostly in Hindi, which makes it kind of a daunting sit. This year, Nick has given my Angmareul Boatda, more commonly known as I Saw the Devil. As with 3 Idiots, this is a film I knew about and knew I’d watch eventually, but which is well past the 2-hour mark in length, in Korean, and concerns both a hyper-violent serial killer and a series of physical brutalities played out against him in revenge. There’s a reason that horror movies tend to be short; there’s only so much the audience can take.
I Saw the Devil is not a great deal more than a long tale of brutal revenge taken on a sadistic and twisted serial killer. Jang Kyung-chul (Choi Min-sik) is a bus driver who also happens to be a brutal serial killer. The first of his victims that we see is Jang Joo-yun (Oh San-ha). This turns out to be a serious problem for our killer because Joo-yun is the daughter of Jang (Jeon Gook-hwan), a police squad chief and the fiancée of Kim Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), a secret service agent. When Joo-yun’s body is found, Soo-hyun dedicates himself to tracking down the killer, torturing him for as long as he possibly can, and then ending him.
