No Tears for the Dead

Gon, a Korean-born hitman, accidentally shoots a small girl during a job in America. Before he can recover, the next assignment arrives: kill the girl's mother. He returns to Seoul, cannot pull the trigger, and is hunted by his own employer. The film is not interested in action. It is interested in what cannot be made good: even if Gon protects the woman, what he did does not come back, and the film says so repeatedly. His own childhood abandonment is tied to the same point. The form is heavily armed: a long office gunfight, aiming sequences in narrow corridors and reloads that try for realism. The action choreography is among the most technical Korean cinema had reached at the time. Lee Jeong-beom directed. He was known for The Man from Nowhere, and the structure here resembles it closely: a guilty man, a woman to protect, a long list of enemies. Jang Dong-gun plays the killer and Kim Min-hee the mother. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean action and extended gunfights. Who it is not for: anyone after an original screenplay. The story is familiar, the emotional passages are overplayed and the middle runs long.