Born To Kill is a Korean movie about a hired killer whose life changes after meeting a girl. Without much effort, she inspires him to be more humane and it gets him (and her) into a lot of trouble. Overall the movie is nothing spectacular. In fact, the story is pretty generic and it unfolds at a very slow pace. I found it was very hard to sit through and I cannot imagine ever wanting to watch it again.

The hired killer the story revolves around is named Kil (Jung Woo Sung). At an early age, his mother died and he was left alone. Without family, he was raised to be an assassin by a crime lord named Mr. Yoon. Something special about Kil is that he does not use guns for his work. Instead he uses a large Bowie knife that was given to him at a young age. This knife plays an important role in understanding who Kil is and how his life became as it is.

Anyways, the story goes like this; one day after a job, Kil stumbles upon a drunken girl. Her name is Soo-ha (Shim Eun Ha). After caring for her, Kil and Soo-ha meet again. Slowly we watch their relationship develop and Kil change as a person. Unfortunately, Kil's new way of life is not acceptable to Mr. Yoon. Soon Kil's world collapses as he must save Soo-ha and do the right thing.

Overall, I thought this movie was a really hard to enjoy. The story was pretty lackluster. Although it is probably fair to say that it was more the delivery which made it bad. Simply how slow the movie unfolded was hard to grasp. It was so uneventful, it was a bore. Another part of this movie was the action. While it was a slow moving film, there were a few action sequences. For instance, the movie ends with a battle between good and bad gangsters. The choreography is mildly entertaining, but far from anything I would want to call exciting.

On a positive note, I think the characters were outlined well, at least the two main characters. Most of the movie was focused on showing what kind of person Kil was and what kind of person he became. Similarly, Soo-ha was also portrayed well. However, while the character development was handled pretty well, it was also a downfall to this movie. There was just too much time spent on it.

The bottom line is this romance/thriller/drama flick is not the most entertaining movie I have seen. In fact, it is down at the bottom. The storyline is pretty generic and played out in a dull manner. Nothing really exciting (or entertaining) happens. In addition, the technical aspects of this DVD are not very impressive either. In fact they are pretty bad. Alone they are more than enough reason to skip this movie.

The DVD

Video:
The video is given in an anamorphic 1.85:1 ration widescreen color format. The picture quality is pretty poor and can be best described as a VHS tape gone bad. Some of the problems include issues with colors. In a few portions of the film you can clearly see the picture go from having too much red to having too much green. Generally, colors to do not look right. There are also frequent glitches and other imperfects in the picture which leaves it looking pretty rough and grainy.

Audio:
The audio track supplied with this release is in a Korean 2.0 Dolby digital stereo sound. The quality is adequate and it provides a fairly clean audible track. There is little distinction between left and right channels. This release also includes subtitles in the English language. The subtitles use pretty poor grammar and have many spelling mistakes. On a few occasions I had to pause and think about what was being said (or rather what was trying to be said).

Extras:
There are no extras included in this release worth mentioning.

Final Thoughts:
Initially I was not sure what to expect from Born To Kill, but after the first action sequence I knew it probably wasn't going to be good. The first action sequence is pretty cheesy and seeing how awful the video/audio was, I knew this movie was nothing really special. As I forced myself to continue, I was only able to confirm that Born To Kill is a dull slow moving movie with a few tidbits of action.