Kill Boksoon: Killer Queen

Murder is big business in Byun Sung-hyun's slyly satirical action epic Kill Boksoon. As the killer CEO Cha Min-kyu (Sol Kyung-gu) succinctly explains, the sloppy work and loose morals of amateurs have caused this line of work to be disrespected. So he's taken it upon himself to implement a new set of rules in order to restore some honor to the profession. Herewith...

1. Do not kill minors.
2. Only do jobs assigned by your company.
3. Always accept an assignment.

But the truth is, there were rules in the old days too:

If you send a bloody knife to a rival, you are inviting that person to a duel to the death.

That's right! Assassins have always had a Code of Conduct. But rules change with the times. As do players. A leader in the field currently is Boksoon (Jeon Do-yeon), a top-tier terminator who has worked her way up that deadly corporate ladder, one offing at a time. She's got her idolizers professionally (Koo Kyo-hwan) and in-training (Lee Yeon) — the latter under a company schoolmistress (Esom) who immediately feels like a rival. But as our heroine points out, "Killing people is easy when compared to raising a kid" (Kim Si-ah). Does being a scythe-for-hire inherently make her an unfit mother? To quote another character: "Making good money is the best qualification"... for that. Yet nothing complicates shady business practices than nosy cops. And love. I welcome such complications!

I also want to add that action pics attain a whole other level when you have a top-notch actor in the lead role: Think Gena Rowlands in Gloria and Michelle Yeoh in Everything Everywhere All At Once. And Jeon Do-yeon in this movie, too.

Kingdom: Ashin of the North: Vengeance Thy Name Is Archer

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.