Working in Korea for the first time and using the Korean reading of his name (‘Choi Yang-Il’), Sai returns to his hard-boiled roots with a revenge thriller which outdoes most recent Korean examples of the genre in visual flair and vehemence. Tae-Soo (known as ‘Soo’) is a loner, wanted equally by the cops and the gangs, who has spent 19 years looking for his identical twin brother, snatched away by someone when they were small kids. (As adults, both brothers are played by Ji Jin-Hee.) At the very moment they are finally reunited, Tae-Jin is killed. Soo washes and hides his brother’s body and then assumes his identity – as a policeman. No-one is fooled for long, but Soo gains enough access to police files to figure out that Tae-Jin’s kidnapper and murderer were the same person. The hyperbolic climactic showdown approaches the intensity of Greek tragedy.
