I'd first watched this Korean martial-arts flick right after watching this other Asian fight-filled extravaganza called MERANTAU. While I felt pretty lukewarm over that one in general, this MFN managed to restore my faith in more modern day cinema from the far east. While also boasting a long-ass 2 hour runtime, this never felt like a drag to me. The story, involving an innocent little girl getting kidnapped by some mobsters thanks to her shitty parents and then her attempted rescue by our highly-trained title character, moves along briskly enough to avoid boredom. The main man, Won Bin, has a sorta THE CROW/goth-rocker-vibe going on and is a pretty sympathetic fellow to side with in this violent spectacle thanks to his horrific backstory. The closest thing I would compare this to is something like OLDBOY except this is not quite as pervy as that Korean classic. I've also seen this compared to those TAKEN series of films but I wouldn't know because I try and stay away from newer Hollywood cgi-filled action crap. Speaking of which this one seems to be predominantly done the old-fashioned way with actual stuntmen and choreography and not just video-game designers so that gets extra credit in my book. Even though the posters all look very generic I would recommend giving this one a shot for some dramatic action thrills.
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