Silent Killer

Flick was reasonably competent until an absolutely disastrous final 10 minutes (actually the final 10 minutes felt more like an hour, and the music, dear lord the music...)

NO MERCY FOR THE RUDE starts out as a confident, fast-talking, self-referential black comedy.. with what would seem like some genuine potential.. Although not terribly original at all, the movie has a charm which so many Korean movies share. Unfortunately, repetition sets in around midway.

Ha-kyun Shin, so great in films like SAVE THE GREEN PLANET and MURDER, TAKE ONE is more than capable of carrying a film, and does not disappoint here either. His character was eerily reminiscent of the actor's role in SYMPATHY FOR MR VENGEANCE, in which he also suffers from a disability of one of the senses. Oddly enough, the love interest also seems to resemble the anarchist-chick from SYMPATHY.. anyhow, similarities between the two films end there.

Ultimately, the movie thinks it's smarter than it actually is. The snarky voice-over, although initially endearing, eventually begins to grate. All said, i'd have given the movie a respectable 6/10, but that would have been before i suffered through the atrocious ending. Only in Korea can emotional melodrama become so pandering and drawn-out (well, on second thought there's always Bollywood)

5/10

Ha-kyun Shin(The Killer) the main character and the narrator is a mute Hit-man who desperately want to speak so he was collecting money through this assassin business for his tongue surgery. The way he narrate the story was amazing. He loves only two things Bull Fighting and the sea food. There are lots of twist in this movie lots of drama and every character plays his role fabulously. Ji-hye Yun(The Girl) was outstanding. I don't want to reveal much because it will ruin the taste. One more thing we couldn't compare it with Kill Bill because that was a revenge movie & this is different. Of course highly underrated movie, must watch and enjoy the ART....

This South Korean character driven assassin movie has more to offer than most. The main character is a mute who is driven by his need to speak, and the characters around him are more quirky than that. The true impact of this director is the way he takes basic human foibles and create realistic and interesting characters who engage and enthrall you. From the broken down ballet dancer to the down and out karate instructor, you instantly get a feel for who they are and like them. The fact that they are assassins is irrelevant. If you had wished that Kill Bill actually brought you characters worth being the least bit interested in, then this movie is for you.

Superb production values aside—and really, what Korean movies AREN'T well made these days?—NO MERCY FOR THE RUDE has a lot of the elements that, when viewed in too many consecutive movies (which can happen in this country's films), tend to shift people away from Korean cinema for short periods of time, and help to explain the terrible financial slump that is plaguing the K-film industry right now. You'd think they could avoid it by mixing genres, but there's often a streak of emotional violence in many (but obviously not all) Korean movies —including comedies—that takes a toll after awhile, and this film has some of that, in addition to some rather cringe-inducing physical violence at odds with it's self-consciously (on the part of the writer) quirky characters.

It's the story of a mute, loner assassin (Shin Ha-kyun, essaying yet another oddball like he did in SAVE THE GREEN PLANET) who lives by his own code of "cool" and dreams of becoming a bullfighter despite being a bit of a bumbler in his profession. His best friend is also an assassin and former ballet dancer who is saving up to buy a warehouse to make into his own studio. Isn't that just quirky and cool? He picks up and beds a sexy bar girl (Yoon Ji-hye) from a favourite post-kill gin joint, and she comes and goes from his life as she pleases, at least until a little street-urchin attaches himself to Shin, at which point a weirdly dysfunctional family is created. Oh, how inventive!

The killer's motto is summed up in the title, as he only kills those who deserve it (of course, the victims are so one-dimensionally sketched that we have to take the filmmakers' word for it that they're really deserving of the grisly deaths they receive). When a hit results in the death of the intended victim's twin brother, the usual volleyballs of revenge start getting served, leading this wannabe black comedy to a typically melodramatic and tragic ending that is almost a foregone conclusion in these kinds of films. Especially the ones from Korea.

Watching this as a double bill with CITY OF VIOLENCE makes for an interesting contrast in styles of on screen physical carnage. Where CITY is rather cartoonish and winkingly overblown, MERCY marks each kill with the juicy pop of an exit wound or the nauseating (and repeated) "chukks" of knives thrusting into chests and stomachs—all lovingly and realistically recreated in crispy DTS and effected as realistically as possible. A flashback scene involving a paid hit on an unsuspecting fisherman is a queasy highlight only because the filmmakers cleverly place the audience in the shoes of the first-time assassin, who (initially) has difficulty with the job because he knows nothing about his scared, misunderstanding victim, and neither do we, which makes it all the more difficult to watch. After that, blood flows with an abject realism but in the end there's no point to anything these self-consciously eccentric characters do, and their fates are made predictable by the very genre!

Some films in the "oddball assassins" genre take at least some pains to show the pointless and unrewarding nature and inevitable consequences of killing, and I guess this one MIGHT be trying to get that across, but I find some of the more effective ones have at least a believable hero worth rooting for: MERCY'S hero is practically a byproduct of his own imagination, but he's not even a remotely likable character once you see how viciously he can dispatch targets that usually don't get much opportunity to fight back. Nor is anyone he comes into contact with particularly likable beyond their wardrobes. By the time the festivities climaxed with the by-now de-rigeur Korean blend of melodrama and spitting blood, I found I couldn't have cared less.

Great movie, though I think that Asia has all but over-killed the gangster genre. It's the typical plot we've seen time and again, though there is a little bit of character development throughout the film. The few action sequences were over pretty quickly, with one or two lasting a bit longer (re: 20-30 sec). I did enjoy the film, though I think I went into it expecting too much.

As to the previous review stating that this is better than Kill Bill... don't believe it. We went to see Kill Bill for the action (which it was loaded with), so comparing this film to Kill Bill is akin to comparing Star Wars to Star Trek Deep Space 9, or Pulp Fiction to 21 Grams; yeah they (my example) may follow some similar plot themes, one set a space theme, or the other set following disjointed time-lines, but that is where the similarity ends. This film was nothing like Kill Bill except it has assassins in it.

Bottom Line: It was a good movie, but don't go into it expecting anything but an Asian gangster cum assassin movie; there is nothing special beyond that.