Fellow followers of all flicks Korean, beware. Netflix has falsely categorized Kingdom: Ashin of the North as a film. Search by "korean movie" and this 2021 offering will wrongly pop up in your final results. IMDb, for its part, has more accurately labeled this feature-length flop a special episode. That makes loads more sense. Oh, it's not that you'll have a hard time following the spin-off plot: Kingdom's tale — of a young girl (Kim Si-ah) who grows up to be an angry archer (Jun Ji-hyun) after witnessing the total decimation of her village — is fairly standard fare. The problem with Kingdom isn't that it's confusing. It's more that only a devotee of its source material would care about what's going on. Trust me. I don't mind a stonefaced heroine shooting arrows at treacherous lords to make them into zombie meals. But the exposition here is so belabored as to be aggravating.
On further thought, I'd hazard to say that director Kim Seong-hun should've thrown out Kim Eun-hee's dialogue and had the characters scream and cry and laugh without words. The most exciting scenes are those with little or no speaking: a tiger's attack of an undead deer; a hunting party's fatal stalking of that same crazy cat. When we see Lady Vengeance dispatch with her enemies one by one, we don't need to hear hre victim beg for his life. This might be one case in which turning off the subtitles could work to your benefit.
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