Assassination is a 2015 film from South Korea directed by Choi Dong-hoon.
The story is set during the 35 years, 1910-1945, in which Korea was a colony of Japan. The opening scenes take place in 1911. A resistance fighter, Yeom Sek-jin (Lee Jung-jae) attempts to assassinate the Governor-General of Japan, Terauchi, and a collaborator, wealthy businessman Kang In-guk. Both survive the bombing, and Kang goes home to find out that his own wife told the Korean resistance about the arrival of the Governor-General and is herself hiding a wounded Sek-jin. Kang's wife attempts to escape from their home, along with their twin daughters and a disguised Sek-jin, but Kang promptly orders her murder. She is killed, and Yeom is arrested, but in the chaos the nurse escapes with one of their daughters.
Cut forward 22 years to 1933, with Korea still under the thumb of the Japanese occupiers. Yeom, who escaped from a Japanese prison and has served the Korean resistance ever since, is tasked with another assassination. He is to organize the killing of another Japanese general, Kawaguchi, as well as Kang In-guk, who is still alive and still a collaborator Japanese lackey. He tabs three resistance fighters, led by a woman named Ahn Ok-yun, and sends them off to Seoul.
However, as it turns out, Yeom is a traitor. He didn't escape from a Japanese prison 22 years ago. Rather, the Japanese turned him and he has been a mole for them ever since. After sending off his three-person hit squad, Yeom in turn tells the Japanese and hires a contract killer known as "Hawaii Pistol" off to kill his hit squad, telling Hawaii Pistol that the members of the hit squad are Japanese spies. But where do Hawaii Pistol's loyalties ultimately lie?
Tropes:
- Action Girl: Ok-gyun was good with sniper rifle. She is also the remaining member of Hawaii Pistol's group sent to kill Kawaguchi.
- Bald of Evil: General Kawaguchi, the evil Japanese commander who perpetrated the Gando Massacre, has a shaved head.
- Bittersweet Ending: Ok-gyun manages to kill Yem but all of her teammates are dead.
- Blood-Splattered Wedding Dress: In an Imagine Spot. Ok-yun considers simply pulling a pistol and shooting Kawaguchi and her father at the wedding ceremony, then imagines herself immediately getting filled full of lead by the guards, and decides they need a better plan.
- Bottomless Magazines: Yeom gets off thirteen shots with his pistol in the chaotic shootout that immediately follows the bombing in 1911.
- Call-Forward: In-guk says that "within ten years there will be war" and he stands to make a lot of money as an arms manufacturer. It was sooner than that, as the Japanese entered into a full-scale war with China in 1937 and attacked Britain and the United States in 1941.
- Closest Thing We Got: Hawaii Pistol and Buddy burst into a dentist's office with a wounded Ok-yun. They drag the dentist away from his patient and get him to stitch up the bullet wound in Ok-yun's arm.
- Cold Sniper: Ok-yun is a ruthlessly effective, ice-cold sniper, as established when she calmly picks off all four members of a Japanese machine gun team as Yeom watches in astonishment. However, she is also nearsighted and needs glasses to be a sniper, which becomes a plot point when she has to get her cracked glasses replaced in Seoul.
- Distant Finale: The epilogue takes place 16 years later, in 1949, four years after the Japanese lost the war and went home. Yeom is tried before a war crimes tribunal, but beats the rap when the last witness to his treason is murdered. However, Ahn and Myung-woo ensure that justice is still done, murdering Yeom immediately afterwards.
- Distant Prologue: The opening scenes are set in 1911, before the main story plays out in 1933.
- Driven to Suicide: The older woman who owns the Cafe Anemone and uses it as a headquarters for La Résistance in Seoul, kills herself as she is being arrested by Yeom.
- Evil Colonialists: The Japanese, crushing Korea under their boot. General Kawaguchi massacred thousands of Koreans in Manchuria. In the present story, Kawaguchi's son Kawaguchi Shunsuke—the man that Mitsuko was engaged to marry—pulls out a pistol and shoots and kills a Korean teenaged girl merely for bumping into him in the street. When a startled Hawaii Pistol says that she's the fourth Korean that Shunsuke has killed, he clarifies: he didn't say he'd killed three Koreans, he said he's killed three hundred Koreans.
- Glasses Pull: Ok-yun, after she sees her own father shoot and kill Mitsuko in an Identical Twin Mistake. There's a reason for this one, as her sister didn't wear glasses so Ok-yun has to take hers off to assume Mitsuko's identity.
- Guns Akimbo: Hawaii Pistol briefly does this during the climactic shootout at the wedding.
- Held Gaze: Ok-yun and her twin sister Mitsuko come face to face during the melee after the first assassination attempt, and take a long look at each other. This turns out bad for Ok-yun, as pausing to look at her sister results in her getting shot in the arm and arrested by the Japanese.
- Hiding Behind the Language Barrier:
- Hawaii Pistol and Ok-yun do this while they are in a Japanese paddy wagon. He says to her, in Korean, that they need to get the Japanese guard to enter the cage so they can jump him, and suggests that a kiss would do it. It works.
- Later they do this again, as she tells him all about how her sister got murdered and she is doing a Twin Switch, while the evil Shunsuke sits opposite them.
- Historical Domain Character: The film is Very Loosely Based on a True Story and several of the characters in the film were real people, including Korean resistance leaders Kim Koo and Kim Won-bong, and General Terauchi (who did survive a Korean assassination attempt in 1910). Ye Wan-bong, the collaborationist Korean prime minister who literally signed Korea over to Japan in 1910, is seen briefly early in the film.
- Identical Twin Mistake: Kang In-guk kills his own daughter, Mitsuko, believing her to be his other daughter, Mitsuko's long-lost twin sister Ok-yun.
- It's Personal: Ok-yun has a specific reason not just for being a warrior in the Korean independence movement but specifically for targeting General Kawaguchi. She was a witness to the Gando Massacre, a Real Life incident led by Kawaguchi, in which some three thousand Koreans were murdered, including Ok-yun's substitute mother the wet nurse.
- La Résistance: The Korean underground independence movement, mounting campaigns of assassination and terror against the Japanese occupiers.
- Les Collaborateurs: Kang In-guk, a Korean industrialist who is so closely associated with the Japanese that he gives his own daughter a Japanese name, Mitsuko. Then there's Yeom, who is turned by the Japanese and becomes their mole.
- Meet Cute: Hawaii Pistol and Ok-yun meet for the first time in a Shanghai restaurant when he saves her from arrest. He has no idea who she is but he twigs that she's up to something, so when the Japanese police enter, he pretends that she is his wife.
- No Name Given: "Hawaii Pistol", the Korean assassin and a main character, is never actually named.
- Pin-Pulling Teeth: Duk-sam does this during the first assassination attempt, throwing a grenade at the target car, which unfortunately for the good guys is a decoy.
- Roof Hopping: Ok-yun does this during the first assassination attempt, leaping from one roof to another as she changes position to get off more shots.
- Separated at Birth: Even before The Reveal it isn't hard to figure out that Ok-yun is the long-lost other twin daughter of Kang In-guk. His other daughter, Mitsuko, meets her sister in 1933 Seoul.
- Something Only They Would Say: In the down time between plotting assassinations, Ok-yun stops at the Hotel Mirabeau in Shanghai to experience this strange Western drink called "coffee". Hawaii Pistol sees her there and tells her to add sugar. Later, when she is impersonating her dead twin sister Mitsuko, Ok-yun makes an offhand comment about the "good coffee at the Mirabeau" in order to let Hawaii Pistol know that it's really her.
- To Absent Friends: As the Korean government-in-exile guys celebrate the Japanese surrender in 1945, Koo and his lieutenant light some ceremonial shots and then share a toast to the fallen resistance fighters.
- Twin Switch: Ok-yun watches her own father kill her sister Mitsuko due to an Identical Twin Mistake. Ok-yun then assumes her dead sister's identity, becoming Mitsuko and returning to her father's household so she can kill him and General Kawaguchi.
- We ARE Struggling Together: A bitter Yeom notes the problem with the Korean resistance, that there are over thirty separate independence groups and they have different funding and operate at cross-purposes.
