The violent South Korean revenge thriller that unexpectedly inspired Marvel
For better or worse, the Marvel Cinematic Universe has irrevocably altered the face of cinema, with the franchise being celebrated and denigrated in equal measure for doing so.
Racking up tens of billions of dollars in box office revenue has plastered a permanent smile across the faces of both Marvel Studios and parent company Disney, although the list of filmmakers to have openly blasted Hollywood’s ongoing obsession with comic book adaptations only continues to grow longer.
Every single one of the MCU’s 33 theatrical releases to date has been rated PG-13, with Deadpool 3 set to break new ground as its first-ever R-rated instalment. Meanwhile, the TV-MA Disney+ series Echo marked Marvel’s maiden foray into harder-edged episodic storytelling, but a violent South Korean revenge thriller has already gone largely unnoticed as a major inspiration for a massively popular movie.
Co-writer and director Jung Byung-gil’s kinetic actioner The Villainess premiered to a four-minute standing ovation at the Cannes Film Festival in 2017, with Kim Ok-vin kicking voluminous amounts of ass along the way as Sook-hee, a highly-skilled assassin who cuts a bloody swathe through the criminal underworld in an effort to exact retribution on those who wronged her while leaving no stone unturned and no body un-dropped to escape her past and secure her future.
Featuring several standout set pieces – including a jaw-dropping hybrid of motorcycle chase and weapons-assisted brawl designed to look like one extended take – the brutally violent stylings of The Villainess hardly jump out as something that would be appropriated by the MCU.
And yet, when promoting Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 in the country, writer and director James Gunn name-dropped it as a major influence. “I think over the past decade and even more, Korean films have been the best in cinema,” he said, “I love movies like Parasite and Mother. The Villainess has amazing action and a lot of the action [in our film] was inspired from that”.
Gunn would also call Byung-gil “one of my favourite directors” on social media, revealing that he’d “make all of my DPs and camera operators watch Villainess as Director J’s work in action filmmaking puts him in the category of John Woo, the Wachowskis, Gareth Evans, and Park Chan-wook.”
Marvel has a tried-and-trusted formula that it largely adheres to in every one of its film and television projects that’s created an increasing sense of uniformity and familiarity, but Gunn’s Guardians of the Galaxy trilogy was always been reflective of its creator’s style, sensibilities, and inspirations more than most.
The Villainess is one of the finest action movies to emerge from South Korea in recent years, and it can’t be a coincidence that much the same can be said of Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 relative to the MCU’s routinely underwhelming output post-Avengers: Endgame.
