Deliver Us from Evil review – slick and serviceable Korean action-thriller

This hard-hitting South Korean action-thriller from filmmaker Hong Won-chan is optimistically described in the marketing as a cross between The Raid and The Departed. There’s perhaps an element of wishful thinking involved here, since Deliver Us from Evil never gets close to the former's giddy choreography or claustrophobic brilliance, nor does it recall the gripping twists of Martin Scorsese’s gangster remake. Still, there's a fair bit of explosive, bone-crunching fun to be had.

The story here does a pretty consistent job of alternately holding your interest and testing your patience. It just kept me on its good side – though it’s very slow to start, with far too many interchangeable scenes of tough-talking gangsters wearing sunglasses and threatening to kill one another, in person and over the phone, but picks up nicely up after forty minutes once the action shifts from Tokyo to Bangkok.

The story feels like a mash-up of countless successful Korean action films, landing somewhere between The Chaser and The Man from Nowhere. Hwang Jung-min plays an assassin who's pulled back in for one last job – to rescue his own nine-year-old daughter from a ring of organ harvesting mobsters. To do this, he teams with Yui (Park Jung-min), a transgender woman whose presence – coupled with Park's winning performance – gives the film it's most unique and interesting dimension. Events unravel in a kind of odd couple manner as these unlikely allies are thrown into a cat-and-mouse chase against a ruthless, crazed killer hellbent on revenge, played here by Lee Jung-jae.

There are a few niggling issues. This is yet another film that presents Thailand through an unnecessary, urine-stained filter, scenes saturated with a distracting yellow tint. Elsewhere, Hong frequently interrupts the flow of the action with flashes of slow-motion that has an oddly dated effect. The characters, aside from Yui, are nothing to write home about, either: we get the typically stoic protagonist on the brink of retirement; a psychotic villain with a knack for randomly killing his own henchman.

The cinematography is nice enough, but the action is the real draw (a late-stage stairwell fight with a silenced pistol is particularly accomplished), though the movie does earn points for the unpatronising and three-dimensional way it treats its transgender co-lead. Deliver Us from Evil is not a patch on the films it wants to be, and there’s a messiness to the way the gangster plots blend into one another that makes it hard to keep track of what’s going on. Little will stick, but fans of this particular breed of Korean thriller will probably find it lands more blows than it misses.

Deliver Us from Evil is now available on various streaming services.