Kill Boksoon (now on Netflix) is a dark-ass action-comedy about a single mom trying to have a decent relationship with her teenage daughter while also earning a living as a contract killer. And Boksoon isn’t just any contract killer, but the best of the best – a rather demanding, psychically compromising occupation that tends to hinder one’s attempts to have an open and honest relationship with one’s offspring. Korean filmmaker Byun Sung-hyun uses the premise as a means to contrast domestic drama with over-the-top action, which is a bit of a high-wire act; now let’s see if he delivers on its promise with zest and originality.
KILL BOKSOON: STREAM IT OR SKIP IT?
The Gist: Her name is Gil Boksoon (Jeon Do-yeon) but her reputation is such that she has a nickname, right there in the movie title. We first meet her while she does what she does best: slay. A Yakuza samurai gentleman, terrific with a katana, stands before her. She fights fair at first, matching his skills with a hatchet she says she bought at Walmart. During a pause in the melee, she looks into a puddle and sees herself beheaded by the man with the sword, a neat trick suggesting she can “see the future,” and has a sixth sense about assessing her opponent and anticipating their next series of moves – please file this away for future reference, because it’s exactly the type of narrative device a movie will use to pull the rug out from under you. She determines the only way out of this is to forego fairness and honor and all that bullcrap, so she ends it with a gun. The “noble” samurai isn’t happy about this, but when you’re in the business of being a cutthroat assassin, that’s the way the cookie crumbles into a rapidly coagulating pool of your own blood.
Boksoon, however, is not gifted with foresight when it comes to (insert record-scratch fzwoop sound here) PARENTING a TEENAGER! Her daughter, Jae-yeong (Kim Si-a), is 15, and more formidable than a dozen seasoned life-liquidators with knives, daggers, machetes, 9mms, wavy South Asian swords, bazookas and all the killy what-have-yous. Boksoon drives in her tanklike Benz SUV from her obviously lucrative day gig to her home with marble floors and enormodome-sized kitchen, where no hand grenade or hand cannon can penetrate Jae-yeong’s life. It doesn’t help that Mom here keeps her true profession a secret, saying she works for “an event planning company,” which isn’t a literal lie, but definitely is a lie in spirit. Boksoon finds cigarettes in Jae-yeong’s laundry; Boksoon doesn’t know that Jae-yeong prefers to kiss girls; you know the drill. Teenagers: Can’t live with ’em, can’t murder ’em like you murder anyone else out there who’s a problem.
So what we have here is a true double-life scenario: In one, Boksoon is a failing single parent. In the other, Boksoon is a superstar of the assassin class, a top-level killer for a corporate org, MK Enterprises, which recruits and trains people in the art of ruthless death-dealing. The company – shadowy, yes, but not so shadowy that it doesn’t occupy some conspicuous real estate – is run by a sibling duo, chairman Cha Min-kyu (Sol Kyung-gu), with his younger sister Cha Min-hee (Esom) as acting director. Min-kyu oversees an assassin’s guild, where everyone agrees to a code of conduct, and pretty much looks up to “Kill” Boksoon as the cream of the hitperson crop – but is she past her prime? Slowing down? Growing a (GASP) conscience? She follows the rules and completes any assignment Min-kyu gives her, except for this one. This one, which crosses a very big, very fat line, and implicates her intern (Kim Yeong-ji) and a fellow MK killer (Koo Kyo-hwan) she sometimes knocks boots with. Meanwhile, Boksoon gets a call from the school principal and learns that Jae-yeong stabbed a kid in the neck with scissors, and when she asks why, Jae-yeong flatly says she was trying to kill him. Methinks the line between Boksoon’s work and personal lives may be blurring just a little bit.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Kill Boksoon seems inspired by the John Wicks and Kill Bills, and maybe Grosse Pointe Blank. It also nods to classic Hong Kong martial-arts and gunplay cinema, but with some of the digitally enhanced megachoreographed action of stuff like Extraction.
Performance Worth Watching: Jeon is pretty good at keeping her character’s inner conflict under wraps as she knifes the life out of a bro or grins and bears it at lunch with the PTA moms. You just wish the film put the brunt of the drama on her shoulders so she can really dig into the character, instead of allowing so much narrative sprawl.
Memorable Dialogue: Boksoon’s ruthless M.O.: “What matters is finding their weaknesses. Even if you have to make one for them.”
Sex and Skin: A brief sex scene in which we see only the big scary scars on Boksoon’s back.
Our Take: Digital blood is a big no-no in action cinema, and Kill Boksoon spills plenty of it, so consider yourself warned. But that’s not a backbreaker here. No, the film raises the age-old question as whether one wants to sit through a lot of plot and character stuff to get to the good stuff – you know, the chases and shootouts in action movies, the punching and leaping and kicking in martial arts movies, the Hulk-smash in Hulk movies, and the porn in porn movies. There’s a lot of “other” stuff in Boksoon, some of which is pretty good – the ironic parallels of Boksoon’s dual lives, and how she arrives at the realization that she can’t be a killer and the good, warm, loving, open, effective, affecting parent she wants to be. You can’t be half moral, half amoral without tying yourself into pretzels.
Writer-director Byun carefully nurtures the tone, marrying bleak comedy – lots of glib jokes about death here – with sometimes overly weighty melodrama. And, more for better and slightly for worse, he directs the hell out of the action, emphasizing hand-to-hand and knife fights, with the occasional headshot-happy flourishes, maintaining a keen balance of exhilarating kinetics and goofy slapstick. But the big problem with Boksoon is the screenplay, which tries to build out the underworld of Korean contract killers (Wick did it better), with talky sequences and nifty, but pointless action – Min-kyu travels to Russia to slaughter a bunch of guys, which is always fun, but here it’s extraneous – and pulls too much focus from the mother-daughter dynamic.
At a whopping 137 minutes, the movie’s a good half-hour too long, and builds to a final confrontation that doesn’t pay off in a satisfying way – which means we’re wading through watchable-but-mediocre stuff to get to the good stuff, which isn’t bad, but could be better. Boksoon throws a crapload of punches, but doesn’t land enough of them.
Our Call: Kill Boksoon is admirably ambitious, and dishes out thrills and smirky laughs here and there, but it’s too all-over-the-place for its own good. Until someone gives it a ruthless edit, SKIP IT.
John Serba is a freelance writer and film critic based in Grand Rapids, Michigan.
