Charismatic star Jang Hyuk plays Bang Ui-gang, a retired mercenary compelled to shoot, maim, slice and dice an assortment of adversaries in this extremely violent action thriller. At all times, Ui-gang also manages to keep his hair immaculately coiffed in a floppy K-pop-by-way-of-1990s-Hugh-Grant style. He’s so darn cool that at one point he arrives at one of the film’s many dens of iniquity with a large coffee in one hand and a gun in the other, and shoots his adversaries stone dead between dainty sips.
This would all seem faintly ridiculous if it weren’t that director Choi Jae-hoon (who recently made The Swordsman, also with Jang) and screenwriter Nam Ji-Woong have injected some biting social critique among all the bloody malarky – notably through the way the story reveals that the sex trafficking ring at the heart of the evildoing is condoned and exploited by people at the highest levels of authority.
