Notebook Primer introduces vital figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.
All images from films directed by Ryoo Seung-wan. Clockwise from top left: Crying Fist (2005), The City of Violence (2006), Humint (2026), Arahan (2004).
South Korea has been a hub for hard-hitting action since the turn of the millennium, and foremost among the industry’s action craftsmen is director Ryoo Seung-wan. Affectionately christened “The Action Kid” (a nickname he himself embraces), Ryoo has remained within the genre’s orbit throughout his whole career; even The Unjust (2010), a film that features just one brief fight scene, is described by Ryoo as containing “the characteristics of an action film, minus the action itself.”1 His latest movie, Humint (2026), joins a dynamic oeuvre that displays his distinctive style while also serving as a cross-section of broader trends within Korean action cinema.
Ryoo’s eye and appetite for action developed early. He grew up consuming the Shaw Brothers’ catalog and especially Jackie Chan movies; began taking taekwondo at a young age; and, in middle school, saved up lunch money to buy an 8mm camera. Around this time, both of his parents tragically passed away. Soon after, he dropped out of school to help earn a living for himself and his younger brother Seung-bum, and to fund his budding film career. For part of the year, he worked an assortment of jobs—from post office worker to sandwich vendor to construction worker—and then spent the remaining months on film sets, which included a number of projects helmed by a young Park Chan-wook. In his early twenties, he directed his first short, Transmutated Head (1996), and landed the role of assistant director for Park’s The Trio (1997). After two of his subsequent shorts won festival awards, he was approached with an offer to expand these into an anthology film consisting of four segments, which became his feature-length debut, Die Bad (2000). Shot on 16mm and with a budget of just 65 million won (under $70,000 at the time), the film premiered at the Jeonju International Film Festival to rave reviews and kicked off his directing career.
It's tempting to read Ryoo’s difficult life circumstances into his early work, which abounds with a sense of scrappiness. Die Bad portrays machismo and disaffected youth using an aggressive, freewheeling style, from an exhausting foot chase between cop and criminal, intercut with mockumentary-style interviews with each, to an undercranked shot where a character rains down blows directly at the camera, accompanied by “chop-socky” sound effects. It’s a formal powder keg, bursting at the seams like its agitated male characters who are beaten down by societal circumstances and the cruel hands of fate.
Top: Die Bad (2000). Above: Crying Fist (2005).
The theme of the hard-knock life would return in Ryoo’s sophomore feature, No Blood, No Tears (2002), which centers on a motley of the washed-up and the marginalized—an ex-boxer, an aspiring singer, an ex-con taxi driver, a trio of youngsters working odd jobs—as they scramble after a bag of money and better tomorrows. It appears again in Crying Fist (2005), which takes Ryoo’s empathy for the down-and-out to visceral new heights. Featuring titanic performances by Choi Min-sik as a former boxer reduced to selling himself on the street as a literal human punching bag and Ryoo’s brother Seung-bum as a pugnacious delinquent, Crying Fist follows these two characters as they try to turn their lives around by competing in an amateur boxing tournament.
The boxing bouts in Crying Fist were co-choreographed by Jung Doo-hong, who designed action for all of Ryoo’s pictures between 2002 and 2017. Co-founder of the stunts academy Seoul Action School and the most influential stunt coordinator in contemporary Korean cinema, Jung has been so involved in contemporary Korean action—whether as fight choreographer, stuntman, or actor—that, as scholar Se Young Kim suggests, the physique and movement style of the prototypical Korean action body can be traced back to him.2 Since his career began in the 1990s, Jung has pioneered a messier, more grounded style of screen fighting—peppered with spectacular taekwondo kicks—that has become synonymous with “Koreanized” action. The committed, expressive physicality of actors and stunt performers—twisting torsos, grimacing faces, arcing punches—sell a sense of pain, force, and destructive intention; it’s little surprise that Korean action is often described as being more “realistic” than its counterparts.3
Jung’s rough-and-tumble style is frequently matched in the camerawork and editing of the directors he works with, anda number of Ryoo’s early films exhibit this tendency. Shots are often tight during fight scenes, deemphasizing clear spatial relations in favor of impressionistic flashes of movement. Impacts regularly occur partially or completely offscreen, with handheld camerawork and rapid cutting further heightening the visual murkiness. The result isn’t always the most satisfying. In No Blood, No Tears, a brutal brawl between two henchmen (one of whom is played by Jung himself) is a maelstrom of scrambled geography, the confusion intensified by repeated breaches of the 180-degree line and the fact that both fighters are wearing black. Nonetheless, theactors / stunt doubles and Foley sound effects sell the force of the hits so that the scene still packs a punch, and there are bursts of visual claritythat actually feel more cathartic by contrast with the surrounding disorientation.
Top: Jung Doo-hong (left) and Ryoo Seung-wan (right) in The City of Violence (2006). Above: Tactile impressionism in the film’s teahouse fight.
Where impressionism becomes an asset is in parts of The City of Violence (2006), which stars both Ryoo and Jung as childhood friends teaming up to investigate the death of an old acquaintance (it’s one of the few times the two have appeared in a film together, and the only time as co-leads). A thrilling teahouse melee, in which the duo tear through a dozen knife-wielding heavies, presents the same type of cramped framing, brisk cutting, and handheld camerawork as No Blood, No Tears, but the balance of elements has shifted. The few wider shots often hold for a beat longer to better establish geography. Screen direction is more consistently (even if not entirely) maintained across cuts, and close-ups of impacts—especially of blades slicing skin—help to viscerally “flesh out” the scene. Additionally, there exists an ingenious harmony between content and form: the spectacle of stabbing and slashing is tactilely evoked in the way blades and limbs whip across the frame in near-abstract streaks of movement, making it feel like we’re being “cut” by the film itself.
A shift occurs in Ryoo’s action style from the early 2010s onward, reflecting the trajectory of Korean action in general. In these later films, the camerawork tends to be steadier, and fight beats are often more centered in frame, making them easily readable. Even when framing tightens and editing accelerates like in the Bourne-inspired espionage thriller The Berlin File (2013), split-second views of key narrative and choreographic information—a glass being smashed over someone’s head, a body crashing through furniture—keep the audience oriented. This cleaner aesthetic is showcased in the first fight from Veteran (2015), in which a maverick cop (Hwang Jung-min) subdues a garage full of car thieves. Featuring visual gags that hinge on wide, continuous shots—for instance, a license plate flung like a frisbee, dropping a henchman in the background—the scene marks a striking departure from the whirlwind impressionism of the aughts, resembling 2014’s John Wick more than The City of Violence. Even with the crisper filmmaking, however, the fight choreography retains the rawness associated with Koreanized action. From a near-naked bathhouse brawl in The Battleship Island (2017) to the bruising foot chases in I, the Executioner (2024), characters really feel like they’re fighting tooth and nail, the desperation writ large in every lunge, swing, sprint, and stab.
Smugglers (2023), a film about female divers (hanyeo) from the island of Jeju and their involvement within a smuggling ring, contains what may be the best action scene of Ryoo’s career. Observing as a smuggling kingpin (Zo In-sung) and his eye-patch-wearing, dual-dagger-wielding right-hand man (Jeong Do-won) fend off a gang of assassins, the scene displays an exhilarating synergy between framing and editing (running the gamut from clean wide shots to expressive close-ups to stylish overhead shots); music (the velvety groove of Sanulim’s “Spread Silk on My Heart”); choreography (fluid, décor-destroying bedlam); and performance (Zo’s steeliness and striking, lanky physique make him a formidable muse for Ryoo). Heaviness begets lightness; crushing impacts and grievous injury lift the viewer into the stratosphere.
Top: A cleaner action style in Veteran (2015). Above: Possibly the best fight scene of Ryoo’s career, as seen in Smugglers (2023).
If Ryoo’s action scenes channel larger currents in Korean action cinema, distinctive to him is cinephilic referentiality and a baroque filmmaking style, earning him the second sobriquet “the Korean Tarantino.”Arahan (2004) riffs on kung-fu and wuxia tropes within a contemporary urban setting. No Blood, No Tears channels the look, tone, and structure of a Guy Ritchie caper, from the dense plotting and the heist set-piece to the speed ramping and rollicking needle drops. Dachimawa Lee (2008), Ryoo’s Austin Powers-style parody of his cinematic obsessions, contains a nearly 20-minute homage to Tsui Hark’s The Blade (1995). The City of Violenceis a particularly delectable genre confection: it imbues a film noir plot with echoes of yakuza knife fights and Chang Cheh-style hatchet-gang mayhem; Spaghetti Western visual and musical flourishes; and a scene with costumed youth gangs that feels lifted from Walter Hill’sThe Warriors (1979).
Such colorful B-movie nods are joined by equally colorful formal flourishes. Ryoo is particularly fond of split screens that fragment the image into comic-book-style panels; split-diopter shots; sinuous tracking shots that evince his stated admiration for Martin Scorsese; and overhead shots during fight scenes. Arahan, Ryoo’s foray into the superhero genre, mixes robust stunt work with dollops of CGI that feel reminiscent of Stephen Chow, conveying a sense of supernatural, slapstick-adjacent speed and force.
Top: Kung-fu and wuxia homage in Arahan (2004). Above: Comic-book-style split-screen in The City of Violence (2006).
Although Ryoo indulges in cinematic fantasy, various of his movies also engage with weighty social and historical realities. Veteran tracks a detective as he attempts to nail the spoiled, sadistic heir to a major corporation (Yoo Ah-in), whom he suspects of being involved in a friend’s “suicide attempt.” Coinciding with real-world cases of corporate malfeasance in Korea at the time, the film joins a lineage of Korean films that critique the socially and morally corrosive effects of unchecked capitalism—a symptom of a country whose post-dictatorship economy has developed with dizzying velocity since the late 1980s. In the sequel, I, the Executioner, the same cop contends with an internet-famous vigilante who uploads videos of their killings. On one level posing the age-old question of vigilantism’s ethics within a compromised justice system, the film also expresses the scary volatility of an extremely online, extremely hypermediated society.
Top: Hypermediation in I, the Executioner (2024). Above: Vehicular mayhem in Escape from Mogadishu (2021).
Ryoo has directed two films based on historical events. The Battleship Island tells of Korean oppression within a Japanese forced-labor camp, but it furnishes this history with the trappings of a pulp adventure serial, complete with espionage intrigue, a prison break à la John Sturges’sThe Great Escape (1963), and cartoonish villains. Escape from Mogadishu (2021) dramatizes an actual incident in which members of the North and South Korean embassies in Somalia, stranded in the midst of the Somali Civil War, are forced to work together to escape. Using the war-torn setting to mirror a divided Korea, the film offers a stirring portrait of shared humanity transcending geopolitical boundaries while lamenting the division that still remains. Nonetheless, even a movie like this culminates with a muscular car chase featuring heavy ordnance and the sight of the virtual “camera” zipping through a bullet hole in the windshield, plunging us into the pandemonium.
Ultimately, action is the heart of Ryoo’s cinema, the height of his achievement as a filmmaker. His latest movie, Humint, follows a South Korean agent (Zo In-sung) and North Korean operative (Park Jeong-min) as they converge on the city of Vladivostok on different missions. Chilly in atmosphere and borderline languorous in pacing—it begins with a homage to the languid opening shot of Jean-Pierre Melville’s Le Samourai (1967)—the film comes alive during its fight scenes. The opening set piece sees Zo’s agent attempt to save an informant by demolishing a posse of thugs. Captured largely in medium shots—distant enough to frame upper-body movements, tight enough to register the ferocity in fighters’ faces—the scene is a marvel of flow and impact. The choreography oscillates between quicker, sharper beats (knife swings, kicks) and more drawn-out maneuvers (grappling). Bruising finishers punctuate the fray: an arm smashed through a porcelain sink, a head kicked through the doors of a cabinet. In a later fight where the two agents team up against a hulking Russian mobster, the interplay between punchy close-ups and clean two-shots—often presenting wince-inducing stunts in their entirety, like a character being thrown back-first into the edge of a metal container—demonstrate an intuitive command of rhythm and emphasis in the filmmaking.
Action filmmaking intuition in Humint (2026)
You’ll find many Korean fight scenes like these—they exemplify the cleaner framing; dedicated stunt performances; and bruising choreography that’s been in vogue—but few as tightly constructed, evincing an instinct for action filmmaking honed over two and a half decades. From Die Bad, which “set the standard for Korean ‘B-movies,’”4 to his collaborations with Jung Doo-hung, to Humint’s steely refinement of mainstream action aesthetics, Ryoo has always been at the leading edge of Korean action cinema, reflecting its tendencies while pushing it forward. All eyes should be on where he goes next.
1. Zak Gottlieb, “KOFFLA 2010: Interview with Ryoo Seung-wan,” ScreenAnarchy, March 8, 2010, https://screenanarchy.com/2010/03/koffla-2010-interview-with-ryu-seung-wan.html. ↩
2. See Se Young Kim, “Jung Doo-hong and the Gangster Body: Kkangpae in Contemporary South Korean Cinema,” in A Companion to the Gangster Film, ed. George S. Larke-Walsh (Wiley-Blackwell, 2018). Kim focuses on Jung’s role within Korean gangster (kkangpae) cinema, but Jung’s involvement in Korean action films in general suggests the broader applicability of Kim’s observations, seen especially in this passage: “Despite his influence and the amount of new research produced on Korean cinema, Jung has not been discussed in English‐language film scholarship. And yet, he is perhaps the single most instrumental figure in Korean kkangpae cinema (and even broader, Korean action cinema), playing an integral role in producing the gangster in contemporary Korean visual image culture. If the mise‐èn‐scene of a gangster film includes costuming, weaponry, and language, then the bodily movements are also of critical importance. In the case of the kkangpae film, those movements are dictated by Jung’s two main functions: through his own body as stuntman and by directing other bodies as stunt coordinator. If it can be said that there is a ‘Korean style’ of the gangster and more specifically the violence of the gangster, then no one will offer a clearer picture of that style than Jung Doo‐hong.” ↩
3. See, for example, Goran Topalovic, “The Fists of Ryu Seung Wan,” trans. Chae Yun-Sun, Subway Cinema, 2005, https://www.subwaycinema.com/ryoo-seung-wan-interview; Song Ji-hwan, “Jung Doo-hong, Action Coordinator of The Berlin File,” Korean Film Council, March, 8, 2013, https://www.koreanfilm.or.kr/eng/news/interview.jsp?blbdComCd=601019&seq=31&mode=INTERVIEW_VIEW. ↩
4. Park Soo-mee, “Film director teaches art of action genre,” Korea JoongAng Daily, April 27, 2006, https://koreajoongangdaily.joins.com/2006/04/27/features/Film-director-teaches-art-of-action-genre/2716424.html. ↩
