Mantis: A Deadly Game

You can see from the earliest, elaborately choreographed fight scene that Lee Tae-sung's Mantis is beholden to video game violence: the neatly severed hand, the neatly severed head. Neither has the visuals of realism. Even the looks of the various players are costume-y: Head honcho Cha Min-kyu (Sul Kyung-gu) wears thickly framed architect glasses; star hitman Han-ul (Yim Si-wan) wields two scythes in homage to the titular insect; and female rival and romantic interest Jae-yi (Park Gyuyoung) has tomboy energy and a slacker-rocker hairdo. So when one character claims that "we're not fucking characters in a fucking game," I, for one, did not believe him.

Especially since the central start-up company of assassins is getting sponsored by a video game company called Blood High School, run by prepster Benjamin Jo (Choi Hyun-wook). Naturally, everyone hopes to be King of the Hill -- including former martial arts mentor Dok-go (Jo Woo-jin). Unlike a video game, however, there's no Replay button. The game that's started is the only game in town. Fighting is a way of expressing love, of showing competence, of making friends, and of making money. Sad to say, per the movie's script, "Corporate style murder businesses rarely turn a profit." Mantis may make money, sure, but is it worth your time? Kill Bookson, this is not. (Although it is a spin-off.)

The Devil's Deal: Take the Lead

Has Cho Jin-woong been miscast in The Devil's Deal? I'd say so. That's too bad as I've seen him play an untrustworthy cop in The Policeman's Lineage and a wannabe Sam Spade in Bluebeard, a well-meaning mobster in My Paparotti and a singleminded detective in Believer 2. So why shouldn't he play a disenfranchised politician resorting to crime to rescue his failing career? It may be that Cho does best with a single clear objective and this part's too full of contradictions. Instead of offering a schizoid performance, he keeps avoiding the potential extremes. Whether he's matching wits with Mr. Moneybags (Lee Sung-min) or cajoling a small-time hood (Kim Mu-yeol) into loyalty, Cho is strangely out of his element yet never overwhelmed. Confusing. He's not fierce or scared or sly. He's neither completely out of control nor momentarily in total control. It likes he can't commit.

Writer-director Kim Mu-yeol's script is likely part of the problem. Kim introduces an unhappy wife (Son Yeo-eun) then gives her nothing to do; starts a subplot with a reporter (Park Se-jin) only to have her disappeared; roughs up a doublecrosser (Kim Min-jae) without having him spill the beans. He neither allows Cho's aspiring assemblyman to outsmart the bigwigs nor to land in a Kafkaesque hellscape. Indeed The Devil's Deal can't figure out how to get its protagonist out of one unsuspenseful middleground. Here's an amoral guy with neither exceptional smarts nor an intoxicating drive. Will he win or lose? And what does winning mean when you were never a serious contender?

Love Untangled: A Knotty Proposition

Whether to go straight or not has some dramatic, even comic, possibilities in it for a movie if you're talking about sexuality. But if you're talking about hair (like should it be straight or not), the potential for being interesting drops exponentially. In the high school soap opera Love Untangled, the curly hair that curses the ingenue Shin Eun-soo (Park Se-ri) doesn't really seem to matter to anyone. It doesn't prevent the new-boy-in-town Han Yun-seok (Gong Myoung) from developing a crush on her. It doesn't mean the most popular boy in school Kim Hyeon (Cha Woo-min). And she's got a cadre of friends. So where's the obstacle?

When Eun-soo invites Yun-seok into her dad's storage facility does anyone not predict that the sharing of comic books and the folding of origami eggs is going to bind these two together in perpetuity? So what's the point? And yet, as one character says, "Does it have to be useful to mean something?" With movies, sometimes the escape is enough. And Sun Namkoong's Love Untangled isn't a total wash. The homeroom teacher — as played by Jo Bok-rae — could have been given an entire movie all his own, what with his strangely slow delivery and unexplained vibe of light menace. This is the kind of performance that would've fit right in for a Richard Foreman play. Instead we get a dodge ball game, a field trip, an abused mom, and the realization that the cutest boy might not be the ideal boyfriend and the nice boy needs your help.

Escape: You Go, Girl!

You remember the movie trope of the diabolical homosexual? Well, that all-but-obsolete evil gay man is back in Lee Jong-pil's delicious North-Koreans-on-the-run movie Escape. This time he's taken the form of Ri Hyun-sang (Koo Kyo-hwan), a queeny major who we first observe when he's putting on a layer of chapstick with his pinky extended. The stereotype doesn't end at shiny lips either. He's got pomaded hair and high cheekbones, a bottle of hand lotion in the jeep and a backstory of winning international music contests with his flawless piano playing. Naturally, there's a young vaping pretty boy (Song Kang) who's part of that painful past, too.

Right now, this fabulously femme villain -- who never has a hair out of place -- is in mad pursuit of a pair of soldiers looking to escape North Korea's totalitarianism. One is Im Gyoo-nam (Lee Je-hoon) for whom Ri likely has a crush. The other is Gam Dong-hyuk (Hong Xa-bin), his lazy-eyed sidekick who is obviously doomed to die from the very start. Will the cute one make it to South Korea though? It certainly seems possible when a gang of nomadic, pistol-packing women exiled from town show up in the woods with artillery and attitude. Then again, hell hath no fury like a gay man scorned! Plus who wouldn't like the skin-enhancing properties that come with a quicksand mudbath, conveniently located at the 38th parallel.

Missing You: The Legacy of Serial Killing

I think it's safe to say that Korean cinema has an obsession with serial killers. Hit movies like The Chaser, I Saw the Devil, and Memories of Murder have become iconic while others like Tell Me Something, Save the Green Planet, and Monster arguably should be. Add to that evergrowing serial killing catalogue of excellence, the heart-pounding Missing You, Mo Hong-jin's warpedly effective thriller which features two mass murderers pursued by the lunatic child of a long-dead victim. (This mentally deranged survivor is racking up a string of killings all her own, thank you very much.) Indeed, everyone in Missing You is violently unwell: recently released madman Kim Kee-beom (Kim Sung-oh) who favors stabbing, his insane childhood buddy Jung Min-Soo (Oh Tae-kyung) who prefers slicing, their primary threat, hyperfocused vigilante Nam Hee-ju (Shim Eun-kyung), and the not-so-brightm police officer assigned to the case Dae-yeong (Yun Je-mun), a man so obsessed with fingering Kim for every crime that he overlooks a lot of clues pointing in another direction.

Is the cop's fixation on the ex-con understandable? I think so. Kim's performance as Kim is supercreepy. Who wouldn't want to see him put back in the slammer for whatever? Yet Kim's hardly the craziest character on screen. That honor belongs to Shim's Nam, who's covered one wall floor-to-ceiling with yellow post-it notes of Nietzsche quotes while her inherited basement apartment's floor boards are carpeted with articles and images related to a series of unsolved killings dating back to her traumatic childhood. Her choice to knit scarves for every member of the precinct where she serves as a mascot isn't simply redirected obsessive-compulsive behavior energy, it's also one small part of an elaborate plan leading up to the day when the courts will sentence whoever eventually gets caught. Will she be there for the trial? And if she does, will she be dressed once again like the Morton Salt Girl? Watch Missing You and see.