Netflix Kill Boksoon: Between Nam Haeng-sun and John Wick — Four Thoughts
Netflix Kill Boksoon — four things the film made me think about.
Netflix Kill Boksoon: Between Nam Haeng-sun and John Wick — Four Thoughts
Kill Boksoon
Genre: Action
Running time: 137 minutes
Release: March 31
Director: Byun Sung-hyun (director of Unjust and The Kingmaker)
Cast: Jeon Do-yeon, Sul Kyung-gu, Lee Som, Koo Kyo-hwan, Kim Sia
Production budget: 15 billion KRW
Brief Story Summary
Kill Boksoon follows legendary assassin and single mother Gil Bok-soon (Jeon Do-yeon), who is raising her teenage daughter Jae-young (Kim Sia) while facing contract renewal with the assassination agency she belongs to, MK Entertainment — and an inevitable showdown with the company itself. MK Entertainment's founder Cha Min-gyu (Sul Kyung-gu) and Gil Bok-soon have a history together. Min-gyu created the rules that built MK Entertainment and established boundaries between amateur killers and the professional collective. If these rules are broken, the company eliminates the violating killer directly.
Bok-soon receives a mission to stage the suicide of a leading prime minister candidate's son — a mission commissioned by the candidate himself, who sees his own son as an obstacle to his political rise. When Bok-soon discovers this, she cannot bring herself to carry out the mission out of maternal instinct. Cha Min-gyu's sister Cha Min-hee (Deputy Director Cha), who has never liked Bok-soon, orders other killers to eliminate her. Bok-soon neutralizes them and kills Deputy Director Cha as well.
Bok-soon then sends Cha Min-gyu a bloodied knife — a blood-on-the-blade challenge — throwing down the gauntlet for a one-on-one duel. She is about to fight for her life against Cha Min-gyu, who has been like a mentor... (abridged)
Personal Film Review
Kill Boksoon opens with a special appearance by Hwang Jung-min (as Oda Shin'ichiro). Bok-soon, dressed in hotel staff uniform, stands holding an axe she bought at an E-Mart for 30,000 won. Her opponent is a yakuza (Oda Shin'ichiro) wielding a sword forged by an Edo-era Japanese master craftsman. The two converse as if running through a sparring drill, discussing how she can't for the life of her understand the mind of her daughter who just entered middle school. After fighting for a while, Bok-soon starts to lose ground — so she announces she'll switch equipment and shoots him dead with a gun. (An assassin has no obligation to fight fair, naturally.) Bok-soon says: the store is about to close, so let's wrap this up.
The film begins with a scene that feels slightly exaggerated, like a frame from a webtoon — and Kill Boksoon turns out to be a more ambitious film than expected. The premise of a #1 killer single mother within the setting of an organized, corporate assassination agency is fresh enough. But it drags in heavy, stimulating subjects — political corruption, college admissions fraud, school violence, lesbianism — all at once, and the weight of these subjects kills both the freshness of the premise and the lightness of the mise-en-scène.
Director Byun Sung-hyun was perhaps trying to land somewhere between the edginess he showed in Unjust and the excess of The Kingmaker, but each subject failed to mesh like interlocking gears — leaving behind only the discomfort of large iron balls clanging against each other inside a single container. That the world is full of contradictions is something most storytellers agree on, but when you shine a spotlight on every contradiction, the audience doesn't know where to look. An overall sense of narrative disappointment lingers — at odds with the subtle, stylish poster and the appealing character of Kill Boksoon.
1. Murder as Profession — What Is a Killer?
The first question after watching the film: "murder as profession." In East Asian martial arts fiction — the wuxia genre — someone who kills professionally is called a "salsu" (殺手). In the Western tradition, an assassin. There are clear connections with the Japanese ninja figure as well.
What defines them is that they carry out contract killings. They accept a commission, identify a target, and eliminate the target by any means necessary. In most cases the compensation is financial, and the price rises with difficulty. It's a business — a relationship of commissioning and being commissioned, mediated by money.
Where business exists, groups form for economies of scale. Killers too form factions or operate as independent forces. Within such a group, there is typically a ranking system from the most capable assassin down — usually called a special-grade killer or "il-sal" (一殺, "First Kill") for the top ace. Gil Bok-soon is the "First Kill" of a modern assassin collective.
What does it mean to be the best killer? To be the one who kills best — to complete any mission, any target, any commission without failure, like a lawyer's win rate. It isn't being the most skilled fighter or having the most spectacular technique. In the film, the subject of "weaknesses" comes up repeatedly — in other words, the killer with no emotions and no weaknesses is the strongest.
"Eliminating your own weaknesses and exploiting the opponent's" — that is the condition of the top assassin. The film shows an unusually high frequency of attacks targeting the Achilles tendon. This is the most effective way to eliminate an opponent's mobility — but simultaneously, the Achilles tendon is the body part that symbolizes human weakness in Greek mythology and elsewhere.
In many fiction settings, killers are raised without emotion from an early age. As with famous ninja training, they might be buried alive or taught to kill from childhood. Trained as killing machines. For them, killing is simply Work. In the past, one's profession and one's life were often inseparable — profession spoke to the whole of a person, and it was hard to explain a person apart from their profession.
But in the contemporary era, where revealing a private domain alongside a public one has become natural, a profession no longer defines everything about a person. For Gil Bok-soon, being a killer is her profession, and being the mother of a 15-year-old middle school girl is her private domain. The two can coexist without contradiction — but internal conflict inevitably arises, because that private domain becomes Gil Bok-soon's Achilles tendon as the world's best killer.
What's interesting is the company Bok-soon belongs to. The company is called "MK Entertainment" — MK being the initials of founder Cha Min-gyu (played by Sul Kyung-gu), and calling itself an entertainment company is intriguing. The company is housed in a stately building (unmistakably the Bank of Korea headquarters) that contains interns, regular employees, Class A/B/C staff, and executives including directors. There's a tiered mission system by rank, with differential success fees. Employees use industry slang but have no particular qualms about their profession — a visible, above-ground professional killing company rather than a shadowy underworld operation.
Audiences don't find this particularly jarring — more like a novel, interesting setting — partly because of familiarity with organized crime drama conventions (Company Man starring So Ji-sub, 2012, etc.) and partly because growing up on webtoons has made fantastical premises feel much more naturally acceptable.
In keeping with the entertainment company setting, the terminology matches. Contract killings themselves are called "productions," the script is discussed, and a first kill is celebrated with "congratulations on your debut." The casual use of "action" as if on a set made me think: the subject of "contract killing" has already been brought into the realm of entertainment as a show.
2. Rule and Anomie — Why Did Cha Min-gyu Create Three Rules?
In the film, Cha Min-gyu is both the head of MK Entertainment and the overall leader of the industry — comparable, in actual entertainment terms, to SM and YG combined. When the market became muddled with everyone and anyone jumping into contract killing, he gathered the key industry bosses and proposed a simple set of rules.
After everyone accepted those rules, the industry reorganized around MK — a conglomerate scooping up all the elites — and a collection of smaller companies. The rules were exactly three:
1) Do not kill minors.
2) Only take on jobs sanctioned by the company.
3) All company-sanctioned jobs must be attempted.
How did these three rules reshape the market? And how did MK achieve near-monopoly control?
This illustrates the importance of Rule in a state of anomie. Anomie is the state of social chaos in which norms disappear, leaving individuals to disregard law and morality and descend into disorder. The methods for ending such a state are various, but generally involve Power or Rule.
In Eastern history, two broad approaches have been used to end disorder and create norms. One is the "Legalist" approach — dense, strict laws applied rigorously. The other is creating just a few overarching rules and allowing flexibility in their application. In a state of disorder without overwhelming power superiority, the latter tends to be more effective for establishing rules — because it allows the rules to take root gradually without provoking major resistance. The famous story of Han Gaozu establishing only three laws (the "Yuefa Sanchang") is a well-known example. The number of rules matters less than the power behind them — the power to set the rules matters more.
So what's behind the three rules? It's a clever balance of moral legitimacy and self-interest.
Contract killing is a coldly professional business — yet with an exception for minors? Depending on perspective, this could be seen as a minimum standard of conscience. But from another angle, it's no different from a hunter or fisherman saying "don't catch the young ones, or the species will run out."
The second rule prohibits unlicensed killing — it bars companies or individuals outside the "association" from taking commissions at all. In effect, it's a monopoly cartel that blocks price competition and reinforces MK's position.
The third rule is about maintaining killer identity and the company's control over its killers. It's the rule Bok-soon ultimately violates when Deputy Director Cha orders her elimination. As long as the target is not a minor, the company can sanction and order any killing for its interests, and the killer-member has no choice but to comply. (The word "attempt" does carry the implication that failure is possible.)
What's clever is that while the three rules appear to apply equally to all assassination companies, they subtly create a rich-get-richer dynamic. In a constrained market where a limited number of competitors compete for a limited market size, without new innovation the first mover is almost impossible to dislodge — and three simple rules lock everything in, making a reversal of fortunes very difficult.
On top of that, MK holds Cha Min-gyu himself and Gil Bok-soon as S-grade talent. Given the film's implication that there are only two A-graders currently in the company, there are presumably additional A-graders beyond the two. This becomes the premium that attracts the best commissions, and draws ambitious interns to apply in pursuit of the idols they look up to. In a constrained market, the rules ensure only MK keeps getting stronger.
3. Affection and Honor — Recognition vs. Recognition
The slight Japanese film quality I sensed in Kill Boksoon comes from a scene where industry peers gather for drinks at a run-down restaurant operated by retired killer Su-geun (Kim Ki-cheon). It's hard to specifically call it a Japanese influence, but that's the feeling I personally got.
Anyway, Gil Bok-soon spends her daytime at mothers' social gatherings discussing where's best for overseas English language programs, then in the evenings joins the killer's pojangmacha gathering. This awkward gathering could be called a semi-private, semi-public meeting — people who know each other professionally, gathering socially. They share a sense of belonging to the assassination industry — which creates empathy and common ground — while also having layers of admiration, envy, jealousy, and rivalry. I too spent a long time working in an industry where I both competed with and collaborated with people from rival organizations, and sitting with them over drinks was a place where industry-wide grievances and distrust poured out, while subtle competitive awareness and watchfulness also crossed the table.
Regardless, these people always crave advancement in status and rank — which is why, when Deputy Director Cha and Han Hee-seong (Koo Kyo-hwan) order Bok-soon eliminated, long-time industry colleagues who share meals together (could they be called "household members"?) draw their weapons against her. Because practical gain matters more than personal loyalty, and no one knows better than they do the sweet flavor of honor earned from felling the best.
Han Hee-seong's emotional thread is more complex. This is the moment I thought Koo Kyo-hwan was a better actor than expected — jealous affection and admiration for a skilled senior are layered with despair over his ill father and ambition for advancement, and these surface quite clearly in his gaze and manner of speaking. Bok-soon sleeping with Hee-seong feels less like romantic love and more like human affection (injeonㄱ) — the warmth between people in difficult circumstances — but Hee-seong receives it as pity. His desire to be recognized (intjong) by Bok-soon, and further, by the company, is overwhelming... and ultimately he turns a blade on Bok-soon.
Watching the industry peers who were massacred by Bok-soon on the night they were being promoted into the A-grade line under Deputy Director Cha's patronage, and watching Hee-seong, I found myself asking again: how close can work relationships really get? Hopefully not as far as killing and being killed... ha.
4. Prime Minister and Son vs. Mother and Daughter
The last thought is about the A-grade commission Bok-soon declines. In the film, there's a scene where Bok-soon and her daughter are watching TV at home, and a news story reports that the prime minister candidate's son had irregularities in his university admission.
Bok-soon, who has no particular sense of moral good and evil, comments from a parent's perspective: "Well, a parent might want to get their kid into a better university." But her daughter pushes back: "That's not fair." This scene connects with the film's opening scene — the duel with Oda Shin'ichiro — and becomes the motivation behind Bok-soon's decision to try fighting "fair" for once.
The cornered prime minister candidate commissions the assassination agency to stage his own son's suicide and win the public's sympathy. A more calculating, cold calculus than a professional hitman, complete with meticulous preparation for his tearful performance before the public. The director was probably trying to contrast the ordinariness of the contract killer placed front and center with the hypocrisy of the powerful.
The shortcoming: no politician would go this far just to become "prime minister." Of course, watching the recent case of attorney Jeong Sun-shin — nominated to lead the National Investigation Headquarters — and his son's school bullying scandal made me think that positions do breed fear. But in our country, the prime ministerial role is more decorative than powerful — someone with the political career to reach that level wouldn't take on this kind of risk. Even in a final presidential campaign with neck-and-neck polling in the late stages, it would barely be plausible.
Anyway, if there's a father and son like that on one side, then on the other side there's protagonist Gil Bok-soon and her 15-year-old middle school daughter Gil Jae-young. The fifteen years the killer mother and daughter have built together are largely elided from the film — but the upscale apartment, school uniform, and talk of vacation English programs suggest they've been living at Daechi-dong level. At some point the mother-daughter's hearts have been closed to each other, and they don't share secrets. From Bok-soon's perspective, there's "a secret she can never reveal in her lifetime" — and her daughter is carrying her own secret she can't tell her mother (that she's a lesbian).
Jae-young's secret becomes known to a male classmate, who gets stabbed in the neck with scissors. After agonizing, she finally tells her mother. Gil Bok-soon, who kills without hesitation, is flustered by her daughter's confession and can't speak. Many films handle such a coming-out revelation through the structure of conflict and denial followed by reconciliation — Kill Boksoon too ends with a wordless understanding, after the daughter watches her mother's raw violence on CCTV, sealed with the line "Don't close the door if you're stuffy."
Personally, I find this an unsatisfying ending — it feels as if the ironies built through layering contradiction upon contradiction were hastily shut away without resolution. Some speculated it was deliberate, leaving space for a Kill Boksoon 2 given Netflix's nature — but Director Byun has said he has no plans to direct a sequel, and Jeon Do-yeon has stated she has no intention of appearing in one, making a continuation of the story unlikely.
Kill Boksoon's universe is a jumble of provocative subjects, but peeled back a layer, it's a kind of coming-of-age story. Killer Gil Bok-soon grows as a mother; daughter Gil Jae-young opens her closed heart and prepares to face prejudice. The same is true of the coldly calculating Cha Min-gyu and Han Hee-seong.
That's perhaps why Kill Boksoon, filmed around the same time as Jeon Do-yeon's drama One Win, overlaps at certain moments. The grit and charm of the One Win character Nam Haeng-sun and the cool yet compelling Gil Bok-soon share something — a common thread of family and growth woven within. Early Kill Boksoon comments featured the line "I'm watching Nam Haeng-sun's double life" — and having seen the film to the end, I understand that reaction a little.
In Closing
To put it in one line: a stylish film that delivers a solid world and compelling visuals. Not the kind of film you'll chew over afterwards, and not so magnetic that you're desperate for a sequel. Many people felt the action was lacking — but please consider Jeon Do-yeon's age. She's a 50-year-old actress with 34 years in the profession. Back in Memories of the Sword (2015), nobody expected action from her either.
What I'd rather lament: it borrows from Kill Bill, evokes John Wick, calls to mind Kingsman and Doctor Strange — but the homage wasn't fully realized. It's not that the involuntary cheerfulness is forced on you — that restraint is good — but it's too light for noir and leaves too much to be desired as action. The strong supporting cast also ends up underused.
Regardless, Kill Boksoon received an official invitation to the Berlinale Special section at the 73rd Berlin International Film Festival last February, and briefly reached #1 in global non-English Netflix rankings — however short-lived that crown was. It holds 81% on Rotten Tomatoes (critic score) and 82% (audience score). The Naver rating splits dramatically by gender and generation.