Plot Details: This opinion reveals minor details about the movie's plot.

A piano, alone, lowly croons to itself, rinsing away with an over-sympathetic lullaby. It hums the dry notes with no effort, as if it’s trying to get rid of the last few stanzas of this paltry ballet, excreting this measly dissonance out of its finely-tuned arsenals. On the screen, a notorious assassin named Soo carelessly stuck the tip of his tongue into the rotten fillings of his appetite, and it recoiled back as if it were under attack. He can feel the urge rising up from his chest to his neck, his veins turn into bloodthirsty snakes, strangling themselves together. He begins to slowly step out of his car using the bitter-end of his leftover strength, and he stood ever-so timidly. He got to this destination because he was in love, in lust with a monster. He adores it so much he lets this cannibal eat him at its own free will. It has been nibbling away at his cells for decades like a lagging cancer. It has driven him mad with lust, but now he steps out of the car, because he has had enough.



Soo is bugged, he sees them curling out of his hashed fingernails and crawl up his arm like a symphony of insects. He can’t stop the music; he can’t even turn it down. These sounds squeezing in his veins, soaking up in his blood, and carrying itself away like an abandoned radio. It has already stolen all his words; Soo misses his articulate voice. He wants it back. Thus, those bare hands barrages down the throat of day’s past, attempting to rip out its tongue if he must. This devil has been haunting him for way too long, and Soo is sick of hearing the damned pitchfork scraping against the floor; because it echoes the screams of his twin brother. He remembers that day twenty years ago, when he helplessly watched his beloved sibling savagely overpowered and brutalized by a group of criminals. They proceeded to drag him away. Soo was too scared to follow, and he never saw his brother ever again. That trail of fear was always right in front of his eyes, and he always knew exactly where his brother was, he just hates the smell of cement and leaking blood admixed together. But today, he could not avoid it anymore, not after all these years wasted, because that will define him. He finally took his first step towards that direction, and then followed by another, and another.



He steps out of the car, outside his brother’s apartment; the pressure is bending his knees. He didn’t have to wait too anxiously. A black camary gently became visible not far away; it loomed in and parked itself. A whitened figure sat inside, he was barely lucent. It seemed as if no one was even in the vehicle. The collected tranquility was frightening; a calmness that disguised inevitable danger. The man looked like a ghost, and Soo was startled by his conventional and studious movements.



The locked driver’s door suddenly liberated, swinging freely like a loose limb. The man stretched out and spanned his body. His chin pulled his neck in range, his nostrils kidnapping all the air at once, his eyes spying on the hidden sky above. Soo watches him from afar, forgetting all about himself. The man starts to lower his view to a more realistic setting, his erratic vision is a crooked x-ray, a panoramic web of jagged lines that winds and staggers the area, studying everything it touches, penetrating through roads, buildings, apartments, cars….and a man. Soo felt this man’s eyes examining him, his apologetic tears quickly changes course and rushes back into his iris. It was indeed his brother, but something was wrong. He is still afraid, scared to walk his way across the interfering parking lot that blocked their supposed meeting. He still hears the coarse voice of the devil, laughing with scorching ridicule; the pitchfork rudely pounding the floor louder than ever, and then the man fell to his side like a hard mannequin. Soo watched his brother go down laughing, and immediately rushed towards him. It was no pitchfork, but a gunshot to the temple. Soo rests his brother’s head on his soft palm, he watched his twin smile and cry at the same time. The piano stops playing.

Thus, the revenge begins.

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“Soo” is a sententious word, its definition being water or Life in the Korean language. It holds a meaning so tight that I could not break it, nor could I find an opening into this deep and solid maxim. It’s oppressive and gravid, like a steel jar carrying a half-dead embryo, restrained in unpolished water. Life is essentially liquid, and all it takes is for a gloved hand to loosen the top, and it will break out onto the dehydrated land, and then drying into death, spreading slowly, trickling down the slope of the stairwell. This is close to what you will witness in high proportions in “Soo” knives licking sharply against your skin, guns that shoot fountains of blood, and also add in a couple of marinated eyeballs in there as well for spice; this makes for a messy foundation for revenge. It’s no wonder the displayed violence is just an exhausted rage at the end of its flourish, and it is lacking of any true feelings whatsoever.



All I remember were screams, voices at war with each other, losing their own battles, then come erupting out from its larynx in lumps of red hot vomit. This film has no clear articulation, no speech, and no direct ways of communication. It doesn’t even have ambiguity. It has a World of nothing. A man has to scramble for atoms. I might have very well watched a completion of muted silence in its entirety, while observing this flat one-dimensional sphere through the smallest hole in the wall; like a miniature universe that you can hold in your hands, but as it keenly moves away, our indifferent eyes fail to follow, and much was lost. In an experience that is so rare and inconceivable, there was a very unpleasant awareness that the camera was in a constant progress of moving away from the design and the characters. At the final end of the sluggish credits, I can only vehemently point all my fingers at the director himself for this chaotic analysis of humanity.



It’s not hard to notice the glaring problems. The Japanese director, Yoichi Sai, applauded for his intense efforts in the Takeshi Kitano vehicle “Blood and Bones”, travels to Korea in attempts to transfer his overconfident credentials into Korean lore; except that this vehicle crashed off into the distance and was blown into scrap metal. Then there came the struggle, the hunger of a conflagrant fire that cannot be extinguished by any amount of water. Director Yoichi Sai was too much of a coward to lift his foot and step into the foray. He prefers to watch them from a safe distance. Thus, we don’t feel the flames of Life irrupting through our skin; we stand merely as a meaningless reflection of his cold and vague characters, none which feels slightly authentic. They only exist in shapes trapped within a single, cluttered architecture. The space is seemingly unbending in Sai’s stubborn usage of the camera. He deliberately chooses sights and angles of extreme corruption, and every single one of them uncomfortable to the eyes. Of course, I would not be criticizing if this was done with sheer style and flexibility, but it’s not even close. Mostly, it is nothing but boxes and cubes; massive square rooms that takes up the whole screen, with a lone individual (in this case Soo more than anyone) sitting by a fogged window, contemplating and murmuring useless soliloquies to himself. As long as we can’t hear it, it’s fine, because it only adds to this wonderfully frustrating experience.




The last resort is the blissful violence, coming in hordes, in an orgasmic exasperation of unconscious water, like an ocean sparkling with fresh blood. Everything else is Nature, floating atop of this Devil’s cocktail. There is a phenomenon that passes over us, crossing the seven seas in one single leap, with no time or heed to notice what is below. Then we wonder and ask; only to have our questions slapped away and ignored. This was the ultimate annoyance in “Soo”, a work that is so depleted that it dares to have a plot that threatens to step above us. Director Yoichi Sai had ample opportunities to support it with the tools that are given, but he chooses not to apply. The picture then comes falling apart, dripping down in pieces. Sai’s main concern was using a story that is ridiculously easy to dismiss, and he is much too dependent on the central character of Soo, a Batman-like avenger who secludes himself from the sounds of the city. His devotion to this character is so severe that it begins to break; Sai destroys the very potential that he created with almost no effort. He gives this vigilante a torment that leads to throbbing insanity. When Soo himself pretends to be his deceased brother, even showing up to his work the next day, it’s time to just wave that red flag (or white in this case), and retreat back to the country that you came from.

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It is all too late, the harm was already done, and the button already pushed. The engram traces my memories, branding the horrible depictions onto paper, as I’m doing now. “Soo” is not just a film, it was a traumatic recollection, and the worst I ever had for bothering to take this film seriously. I even loathed the man who played Soo, an actor named Jin-Ji-Hee, who was having a party in the previous romantic comedy “Bewitching Attraction”. But here, he is indeed grim, and constantly pondering his own reflection which he keeps in his ultra-cool crystal looking knife. His depressed Oriental appearance, plus narrow tranquilizing eyes, is a rude match for a hitman. It was about time that he took on a role that transcended his personality. Even though his portrayal of Soo is almost exactly how a hitman should be portrayed, I still had a stomach full of disgust and hostility towards him. Being a main character of the film, you would think that he should at least have some tolerable qualities. In a genocidal bloodbath that involves only him and his adversaries, he somehow brought a girl along to be the damsel sidekick; and in the middle of the carnage, the girl unexpectedly kisses him, their heavy breaths groping each other’s faces, she tells him to be careful. Soo gets up, and lunges himself into the crowd of enemies. The girl happens to be the fiancé of Soo’s brother.


I know, you have got to be f*cking kidding me.




Recommended: No

Viewing Format: DVD