REVOLVER Review: Jeon Do-Yeon Fires Only When Ready In Oh Seung-Uk’s Seething Revenge Noir
Revolver is now available on DVD and Blu-Ray through Amazon, and on Digital.
Director Oh Seung-uk takes a page or two from the likes of Brian Helgeland and Park Chan-wook for his latest offering, pitting actress Jeon Do-yeon in one of her finest roles yet. Leading the cast in Oh’s new thriller, Revolver, the Kill Boksoon star is furbished into a slow-burn crime procedural centered on a protagonist focused squarely on getting what’s hers after paying her just dues. Oh’s screenplay, co-written by Joo Byeol, articulates itself brilliantly for a cerebral story driven by well-written characters, all woven tightly into a story that seldom leaves a bodycount for its big picture narrative.
Our story sees Su-young (Jeon), a former cop exiting a two-year sentence after taking the fall for a slew of corruption charges that implicate a cabal of corrupt law enforcement persons and shady underworld players, including police Captain and secret lover Seok-yong (Lee Jung-jae). Time proves hefty for the otherwise ill-fated Su-young, however, with the Captain murdered during her incarceration, and on her first day, learning that her payout package is nowhere to be found.
Making matters worse is that the people responsible for making her whole have seemingly vanished, and the apartment that was supposed to be hers just a few years earlier now belongs to someone else. From this point on, it’s up to Su-young to hone in on her interrogation skills and police tactics to trudge her way through the shadow of the formerly promising world she lived in. What follows is a searing tale that gets just a little more brutal and unsettling each moment, watching Su-young as she toils to unravel the mystery of the organization that took Seok-yong’s life, and turned its back on her.
Revolver is a thoroughly-woven crime flick rife with fallible and complex characters. Jeon remains a force to be reckoned with in a role less physically demanding than in her last actioner, but still just as inviting. Having crooked her way into the plot, her only means of obtaining any kind of revenge or redemption is by taking the people down who wronged her. To this, what I like most here is how the gravity of this m.o. has already shifted. She already regrets the choice she made and while she does look forward to her payday, par for the course is ultimately solving Seok-yeon’s murder.
Co-star Lee isn’t given a whole lot for his performance as Seok-yeon. His screentime is limited in a series of flashbacks that occur just a handful of times in crucial scenes that matter, but it certainly does boost the film’s profile having cast someone who’s earned his way into international stardom in the last two years. Actress Lim Ji-yeon lends her support as Jung, a nightclub hostess whose beauty and facetious demeanor lay a proper foundation to Su-young’s untrusting atmosphere. Indeed, there’s a good part of Jung that admires and even cares about Su-young to some degree, although Jung, like most of the core characters in Revolver, is gonna do Jung regardless, consequences be damned. It’s only a matter of time before her actions catch up with her though, and whether or not she herself can make the right choices in the end remains to be seen.
The cast also lists Ji Chang-wook, Kim Joon-han, Kim Jong-soo, Jeong Man-sik, along with Jeon Hye-Jin, and Jung Jae-Young, each contributing a little something to Revolver that keeps you on your toes from start to finish. Oh assures that viewers will get to explore each of these characters and some of their dimensions while telling a progressive and chilling tale of redemption, conserving the spectacle between chapters and letting the characters tell the story without much fluff; The title alone would give you the impression that Revolver is more than what Oh delivers here. The titular gun in question is merely a plot device in the scheme of things, carried by Su-young who spends her more perilous moments wielding a baton with unyielding resolve when shit goes down until it’s actually time to whip the six-shooter out.
Far from a miss, what you get with Revolver is a taut, gripping dramatic thriller told only in the way it could be, with brilliance and poise for most of the way. There’s a whodunit element that gets conveyed, although that doesn’t matter much when the second half arises. By then, you’re more interested in seeing Jeon collect her prize, even with a bigger twist at hand that highlights the kind of parables about money this would be attributed to. It’s not cheesy or trite given the weight of the story, which – to add – never lets up. If you love unhurried, melodramatic crime thrills with anti-heroines that aren’t afraid of the odds, Revolver doesn’t shoot blanks.
