“Revolver” Theatrical Poster
Director: Oh Seung-wook
Cast: Jeon Do-Yeon, Ji Chang-wook, Kim Joon-Han, Kim Jong-Soo, Jeong Man-Sik, Jeon Hye-Jin, Lee Jung-Jae, Jung Jae-Young, Ma Woong-Kyu
Running Time: 114 min.
By Paul Bramhall
Revolver marks the third directorial outing for Oh Seung-wook, and while there’s nothing particularly out of the ordinary about a director making their third feature, what makes Seung-wook’s case relatively unique is that it’s taken him the best part of quarter of a century to get there. Debuting in 2000 with the identity swapping gangster flick Kilimanjaro, it’d take 14 years for Seung-wook to make his sophomore feature with 2014’s The Shameless, a movie that I personally consider to be one of the best from the 2010’s. A decade on and Revolver sees Seung-wook reunite with his lead from The Shameless, the legendary Jeon Do-yeon (Beasts Clawing at Straws, Memories of the Sword), for another slice of hard-boiled noir that his style of filmmaking feels synonymous with (even if it is sparsely spread out across 24 years!).
Seung-wook has shown an affinity for taking typically unlikeable characters and making them the leads of his stories, and here is no different, with Do-yeon playing a corrupt cop who we meet as she’s being released after serving 2 years in prison. It’s shown in flashback that before her time behind bars she was in a relationship with another corrupt cop, played by a cameoing Lee Jung-jae (Hunt, Svaha: The Sixth Finger), who receives a call tipping him off that evidence has come to light incriminating Do-yeon for taking bribes. Together with the suspicious owner of an investment firm Jung-jae has been working with, played by Ji Chang-wook (Hard Hit, Fabricated City), the pair convince Do-yeon to take the fall, and in return she’ll have her own apartment, a security job at the investment firm, and 700 million won upon release.
Naturally things go awry, with Jung-jae mysteriously killing himself while Do-yeon is inside, and upon walking through the prison gates to freedom there’s no sign of Chang-wook. Instead she’s picked up by the madame of a hostess club played by Lim Ji-yeon (Spiritwalker, Tazza: One Eyed Jack), revealing she knew Jung-jae and that he’d told her of Do-yeon’s release date, but whose intentions behind connecting with her remain unclear. Realising she has practically nothing to her name except a tarnished reputation, Do-yeon sets about tracking down Chang-wook to claim the 700 million won along with the apartment she was promised, and exploring Ji-yeon’s connections to the nightlife scene prove to be as good a place to start as any.
In my review for The Shameless I’d referred to it as a “classic hardboiled tale of an undercover detective falling for a gangster’s moll”, and similarly Revolver could best be described as a classic hardboiled tale of the felon freshly released from prison seeking revenge against those who did them wrong. It’s a story that’s been told plenty of times before, but thankfully Do-yeon imbues the character with enough recognisable traits that her performance makes it easy to look past some of the more familiar narrative beats. Despite harbouring very little self-worth after what she’s been through (in one scene she’s referred to as a “bottom feeder”, to which she responds by calmly agreeing), there’s a quiet determination underneath the surface that keeps her moving forward, motivated by the desire to ensure she gets what she was promised.
Despite it being ill gotten, Oh-seung’s script (co-written with Joo Byeol) never casts judgement on Do-yeon’s character, and at no point does it feel the need to have her regret the earlier actions that led to her imprisonment in the first place. She was promised certain things by agreeing to take the fall for everyone that was involved, and now she’s out to get what she’s owed, it’s this that becomes the sole motivator now that she’s no longer incarcerated. It’s also this that makes Revolver such a joy to watch. The last time Do-yeon was onscreen it was for a regrettable foray into cookie cutter Netflix action movies with 2023’s Kill Boksoon, an overly bloated narrative disaster that stuck religiously to the straight-to-streaming playbook. To see her reunite with a director like Oh-seung feels like a return to real filmmaking, or at least a movie that represents the vision of the director at the helm, and not a bunch of commercial tick boxes.
Much like Kilimanjaro and The Shameless Oh-seung shows an assured hand at directing with a deliberate pace, allowing the audience to follow Do-yeon down the dead ends and unexpected changes in direction that her lonely mission takes her on. This isn’t the movie for anyone that was hoping to clock in to Revolver expecting Kill Boksoon 2. Best described as a character piece, rather than any kind of realisation of past wrongdoing, Do-yeon sees her only shot at redemption as getting the money she was promised, and the journey sees her forced to become the kind of criminal she should probably have been arresting when she was still a cop. She leverages the dirt she has on a prosecutor to get him to fund the investigation, and finds herself reluctantly asking for help from a washed-up gangster, offering up another welcome cameo from Jung Jae-young (Confession of Murder, The Odd Family: Zombie On Sale).
It’s Jae-yung’s appearance that encapsulates one of the aspects I enjoyed most about Revolver, which was the restraint shown in not needing to know every little detail about every character. In a world of content hungry streaming services I couldn’t help but feel that, if it’d been made as a series, we’d probably have gotten a whole episode dedicated to Jae-young’s backstory and how he ended up the way we see him in the present. It’s not necessary to the story being told, so we don’t get to see it, simply knowing that he used to have a connection with Jung-jae and has obviously seen better days is all the audience needs to know. Similarly for Lim Ji-yeon as the hostess bar madame, while certain lines offer up glimpses into her relationship with Jung-jae while Do-yeon was on the inside, Oh-seung understands that less can be more when it’s done right, and here the ambiguity works in the stories favour.
On a slight tangent, whenever there’s a scene which features Do-yeon and Ji-yeon together I challenge anyone who’s a fan of Korean cinemas early 2000’s output to not be reminded of Ryoo Seung-wan’s No Blood No Tears, when it was Do-yeon playing the younger character alongside Lee Hye-young. Like that movie subverted expectations by casting an action movie with a pair of female leads (seriously, name one Korean action movie prior to 2002 with a female lead!), so Oh-seung chooses to subvert expectations with the finale of Revolver. Almost as if to acknowledge the audacity of Do-yeon’s mission, the convergence of several characters in the middle of a road becomes a surprising exercise in black humour, as almost everyone that Do-yeon has been in contact with unexpectedly finds themselves in the same space.
By this point we know Ji Chang-wook’s villain is just a small piece in a much bigger game, with his relationship with the mysterious Grace who oversees everything shrouded in mystery – some say they’re lovers, others that he’s her younger brother – with the truth only coming out in the penultimate scene. It’s a revelation that’s best described as satisfyingly underwhelming, with Ju-yeon having reached the end of the road in her quest to find who’s going to pay up, offering up an apt conclusion for a scene that takes place on the grounds of a Buddhist temple.
While I’d love nothing more than for Oh Seung-wook to be even slightly more prolific, as it is he’s 3 for 3, with no kinks in the amour. A quietly simmering potboiler that plays like a pulpy detective novel, only the detective is a disgraced female cop with nothing to lose, Seung-wook’s latest works precisely because it chooses to place intrigue over bombast, sticking to its guns until the final scene. The gun in question? A Revolver of course.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7.5/10
