Here's 2017’s most breathtakingly unhinged action film

Sit down, Wonder Woman. Here’s how avenging angels should roll

Kim Ok-bin: enthusiastic and committed
Kim Ok-bin: enthusiastic and committed
The Villainess
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Director: Jeong Byeong-Gil
Cert: Club
Genre: Action
Starring: Kim Seo-hyung, Sung Joon, Ye-Ji Min
Running Time: 2 hrs 9 mins

Sit your waxed arse down, Wonder Woman. Here's some old-school Asia Extreme riffs to show you how avenging angels ought to roll.

The Villainess opens with a blistering first-person shoot-'em-up, cut-'em-up, shoot-'em-up charge down the corridor of a meth factory. Picture Oldboy's most iconic fight scene but faster and with more weaponry.

Eight minutes and many bad-guy corpses later and we establish that the rampaging assassin is a woman. Well, phew. They couldn’t possibly sustain that level of carnage? Or could they?

A few completely nutty plot twists and flashbacks later and Kim Ok-bin finds herself in a government facility where they train killers in acting and cooking: all the better to enter society as a sleeper agent.

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She's not happy about these new digs but she is pregnant with her dead husband's child, so she agrees to stop attempting to escape and to play ball with the ill-defined Korean Intelligence Agency.

Soap opera convolutions follow, in a narrative trajectory that might have been cribbed from La Femme Nikita, Kill Bill and The Raid. These entertainingly unlikely developments – plastic surgery, returns from the dead – merely provide the foundation for more fights with axes, fights with swords and – sit tight – fights with swords on motorbikes.

The enthusiastic and committed Kim Ok-bin may not possess the mesmerising fighting skills of JeeJa Yanin (Chocolate) or the etched focus of Lee Young-ae (Lady Vengeance), but working with innovative stunt co-ordinator Kwon Gui-duck, cinematographer Park Jung-hun and director Jeong Byeong-Gil, she makes for plenty of unrivalled and breathtakingly unhinged spectacle. No wonder the gang received a 10-minute standing ovation at Cannes.

Mother! doesn't get dibs on all the crazy this week: stand up for this year's most demented actioner.

Tara Brady

Tara Brady

Tara Brady, a contributor to The Irish Times, is a writer and film critic