Picked by: John Why: Found it on Instagram reels — a quick montage of films, high ratings, Korean, went in completely blind. That combination has worked for John before. It worked again.
The Conversation
John went first and was already sold before the conversation started. Two hours twenty minutes, didn’t check his phone once. He called it “brutally beautiful” — a phrase he attributed to a reviewer and immediately adopted. His shorthand for the film was Korean John Wick, or “June Wick” as he put it, which he was proud of. A special agent’s fiancée is murdered by a serial killer in the opening minutes; he dedicates himself to hunting the killer down, letting him go, hunting him again, letting him go, and repeating — the GPS tracking device he forces the killer to swallow being the operational spine of the whole film. John loved the catch-and-release structure, loved the moment the killer ends up in a taxi driven by two cannibals who use the exact same lines on him that he uses on his victims, and loved the ending, which he had been mentally wagering on the whole way through. He gave it a 90, tying Dead Ringers for the highest score he’s ever given.
Sam was more measured. He’d seen enough revenge films that the premise didn’t feel fresh, and Katie tapped out partway through, which meant he finished the last 25 minutes separately. But he stayed engaged throughout because the killer was genuinely believable — he put him in the Javier Bardem/Anton Chigurh category of pure-evil characters who don’t operate by any rules you can reason with. His read of the film’s thesis: you think you can beat someone like this, but you’ve already lost the moment you engage on their terms. The protagonist gets more people hurt, allows the killer to assault more victims, and ends the film as something closer to a monster than a hero. He connected it to No Country for Old Men — not because the films are alike exactly, but because both center on the same idea that unadulterated evil doesn’t play fair and can’t be contained by a revenge narrative. Sam gave it a 75.
Sean landed at 72, appreciating more than he was fully won over. He thought the violence had genuine weight early on — the Achilles scene made everyone flinch, the laxative scene was the most disgusting thing in the movie by his estimation — but that the film kept adding genres (thriller, martial arts, horror, revenge procedural, Saw-style cat-and-mouse) until the tension got diluted. He compared it to Saw directly, which he meant as a compliment on the “want to play a game” structure, but noted the tone shifts made it hard to know when to be afraid versus when to just enjoy the action. Still a fun watch, especially arriving immediately after Toys, which he acknowledged may have inflated everyone’s baseline.
A few specific moments: the cannibal sequence, which John compared to a Red Dead Redemption side mission, got singled out as the point where the film escalated into something stranger and more memorable than a standard revenge thriller. The reveal mid-film that the fiancée was pregnant — which the protagonist didn’t know — restarted everyone’s emotional investment right when it was starting to flag. The final guillotine trap, the killer’s family arriving, and the ending’s ambiguity — grief finally breaking through versus Joker-coded laugh-cry of a man who became what he hunted — got the most discussion. John and Sam landed on opposite interpretations and both were defensible.
The female characters got acknowledged as basically set dressing, which the group noted and moved past. The direction and cinematography got genuine praise — close-ups that worked, gore that felt purposeful rather than gratuitous, and a sense of formal control that kept the brutality from feeling cheap. No capital punishment in South Korea since 1997 came up as relevant context; the killer knows he’ll live, which is part of why the protagonist’s revenge logic breaks down.