A frenetic action movie about a tired-of-life assassin that begins with a hatchet fight? From the director and star of The Swordsman? Uh, that’s a big old hell yes from around these parts. And that’s precisely what we get from Choi Jae-hoon’s The Killer. Not to be confused with John Woo’s 1989 classic of the same name, this is nevertheless also a kickass time. (This latest Killer is an adaption of Bang Ji-ho’s novel, The Kid Deserves to Die, and it’s easy to understand why the title was changed for multiple reasons.)
Just a heads up right out of the gate, Paid in Blood has been marketed as a fast-paced action film, which it is decidedly not. Despite a few quick flurries, there’s really only one straight-up action scene. More than that, director Yoon Young-bin’s film, also known as Tomb of the River, aims to be more of a taut, sprawling underworld epic. It eternally lingers right on the verge, on the precipice of violence, but even punctuated by quite a few stabbings, they’re honestly pretty low-key as far as stabbings go.
