Veteran Actioners
Ryoo Seung-wan and his favourite alter-ego Hwang Jung-min hope lightning can strike twice.
I, the Executioner
Directors: Ryoo Seung-wan • Writers: Lee Won-jae, Ryoo Seung-wan
Starring: Hwang Jung-min, Jung Hae-in, Oh Dal-su, Jang Yoon-ju, Ahn Bo-hyun
Southe Korea • 1hr 58mins
Opens Hong Kong Sep 26 • IIB
Grade: B
I’m just going to put it out there: any movie that begins with an OTT bust-up of a housewives’ illegal gambling den set to the eternally cool strains of Eurodisco titans Baccara (“Yes Sir, I Can Boogie”) gets an automatic pass. After that gem winds down what’s left is an entirely predictable but mostly entertaining follow-up to director Ryoo Seung-wan (The City of Violence, Escape from Mogadishu) and star Hwang Jung-min’s (12.12: The Day) massive 2015 hit, Veteran. It’s no surprise Veteran was a hit: Hwang is the star in 30% of South Korea’s top ten grossers of all time, Ryoo’s stylish action films have been steady earners since the late 1990s and Veteran was about an entitled piece-of-shit rich kid who gets his. There is little Koreans like better than eating the rich.
I, the Executioner | 베테랑2 picks up 10-odd years later with our favourite rough and tumble detective Seo Do-cheol (Hwang) working the Violent Crimes Investigation Unit, and dealing with a messy home life. His wife Joo-yeon (Jin Kyung) wants Do-cheol to spend more time with their troubled son Woo-jin (Byun Hong-jun), but work constantly beckons. And the problem is, he goes. Joo-yeon had a great moment in the first film when she quietly took the piss out of the entitled piece-of-shit rich kid’s lawyer (I honestly don’t remember the son) but she doesn’t see much of that action this time. But, if you think the son has been written into the script to make Do-cheol a more complete character and give him a rich emotional life think again. Ryoo moves his players around as if on a chess board, in order to realise one creative set piece after another. That’s I, the Executioner’s raison d’être. And that’s enough.
Here we go again
This time out Do-cheol and his squad – the charming, feet-first-to-the-head/ribs detective Miss Bong, (Jang Yoon-ju), Min Kang-hoon (Ahn Bo-hyun) and their perpetually pleading with his superiors captain Oh (Oh Dal-su) – find themselves on the trail of a vigilante going by the name of Haechi, and who seems to be running around Seoul murdering criminals that skated through the courts. One of those criminals is Jeon Seok-woo (Jung Man-sik, the underrated Beasts Clawing at Straws), a henchman of the first film’s entitled piece-of-shit rich kid (for the record, Tae-oh, played by Yoo Ah-in) who gets out on parole and kills a pregnant woman. The public is on his side, as is the reporter Do-cheol tried to ally with against Tae-oh, Park Seung-hwan (Shin Seung-hwan), now an agitating online hack. The last piece of the puzzle is too-good-to-be-true rookie Park Sun-woo (Jung Hae-in) – seriously, could this kid be any shadier? – who joins Do-cheol’s team. Let the games begin.
I, the Executioner doesn’t bring anything new to the budding franchise, though the point was probably more to simply revisit a popular character (really popular) and create more stylish highjinks (props to returning cinematographer Choi Young-hwan, working in a lot of darkness). There are more Ryoo-esque flourishes here: a great rain-soaked rooftop fight with the first suspected Haechi is the stand-out, though a grimy shooting gallery dust-up and a clever (and painful) use of broken glass in the closing throwdown ranks a close second and third. Ryoo and Lee Won-jae’s script leans more into comedy too, with a reprehensible bad guy not quite as reprehensible as Tae-oh was (that guy murdered a pooch, FFS). Character motivations are all about skin deep, and Do-cheol and Woo-jin’s fracturing father-son bond plays out like an afterthought. Is he getting into fights at school? I’m not sure. Squint real hard and you might see a comment on the flagging credibility and overly-empowered nature of organised police forces, and maybe a gentle scolding of the modern thirst for public justice thanks to disenchantment with the law, but like I said. Squint real hard.