Reviewed by Alicia Glass

A mother hiding a killer secret that she’s actually a professional assassin, deals with the trials of being a single mother to a begrudging teenage daughter, and oh yeah, difficulties and potential regime changes at work!

So Gil Boksoon (Jeon Do-yeon) is known as Kill Boksoon by her colleagues because well, that’s what she does, she kills people. And actually, amongst all these mostly men, former military or kkangpae, mafia or yakuza, the trained assassins and the enthusiastic newbies, Boksoon is an absolute legend and worthy of all their respect. Her kills are numerous and skillful, creative without generally going off the brief, with a 100% success rate inside the Company, which in turn generates Boksoon at least a little bit of leeway with the boss of MK Ent., the high-powered job agency for professional murderers.

Chairman Cha (Sol Kyung-gu) leads MK, and came up with the 3 rules that all the Companies have to follow if they want to be considered part of the overarching enterprise of professional murderers – 1 no killing minors/children, 2 only participate in “shows” or “events” sanctioned by your Company, and 3 you must always attempt any “event” that is sanctioned by your Company. This is all terribly relevant throughout the movie, most often concerning Chairman Cha’s reputation and legacy, and also his pretty obvious affection for Boksoon that allows him to let her get away with at least bending the rules, until she outright breaks them. Chairman Cha also has another ornery woman in his life to contend with, his sister Cha Min Hee (Esom), a director in MK who has it out personal for Boksoon. Because in such a literal cutthroat male-dominated business like murder-for-hire, it makes sense for the one seriously ambitious woman in power to be determined to take out the only other woman she sees as competition.

Several down-on-their-luck co-workers get together with Boksoon on the reg at a bar where everyone seems to know everyone else, the place is overseen by a former assassin complete with a fake hand to hide his missing one, and the little self-seeking murderer trying to climb the ranks of MK while also climbing into Boksoon’s pants for secret trysts, Hee Sung (Koo Kyo-hwan). The place is a bit like Cheers for John Wick fans, especially when the contract for Boksoon’s own head gets disseminated, and suddenly fists, bottles, and fake hands are all flying in an attempt to take Boksoon down!

All of this is a pain in the unmentionables to deal with at work, but that’s practically a breeze for Boksoon to contend with, compared to the attitude of her teenage daughter Gil Jae-Yeong (Si-ah Kim). Surrounded by expensive things, living in a giant lush apartment with her single mother, Jae-Yeong attends an exclusive private school and is embroiled in typical high school shenanigans, mostly bullying about her burgeoning sexuality.  Kill Boksoon approaches the difficult topic of lesbianism, still a taboo if not outright illegal subject amongst the more traditional South Korean populace, in Boksoon’s daughter with grace and understanding from both sides of the aisle. If all the scenes with Boksoon fighting various enemies and allies are over-the-top and bombastic as hell, the beauty of raw empathy and absolute need for human connection is saved for the hard scenes with Boksoon and her daughter Jae-Yeong, creating an excellent balance for the whole film.

 So where are we at now? Bok-soon’s 15 year contract with MK with her daughters life as collateral, is soon to expire, and of course the Chairman wants her to do another contract with MK, by means fair or foul, at this point the Chairman is fraying at the edges and doesn’t care about the method, just the results. His rotten sister sent out the contract on Boksoon’s life with a bonus promise of a high-level position in MK upon payment of Boksoon’s head, and the resulting killer chaos is just bloody gorgeous to watch. Jae-Yeong is being threatened with being outed at school, but it’s her voluntary outing to her mother that brings issues with her daughter to a head finally, and not a moment too soon. It also helps that Jae-Yeong is clearly not any kind of dummy and has assumed her mother actually works blackops for the National Intelligence Service, the Korean equivalent of our CIA or other Intelligence agencies, and that serves Boksoon just fine and dandy.

Time is running out and Boksoon has to literally kill her way to the top, to have her final confrontation with the person who started the whole grand guignol, the Chairman himself. The tiny sprinkling of scenes where the Chairman and Boksoon met for the first time, back when neither one of them had a title but Boksoon was already clearly capable of doing the hard, murderous thing, are welcome and amusing, and a surprise cameo from Lee Jae-wook as the young CEO is stellar.

To find out if Boksoon really does get terminated by her own work, catch Kill Boksoon on Netflix now!