Coriolanus (directed by Ralph Fiennes, script by John Logan based on a story by William Shakespeare, 2011): I think I came into this one with the wrong expectations. I’ve never read the play, and the trailer made it seem much more exciting than it actually is. Gerard Butler, Ralph Fiennes, a blood feud that leads to a man being outcast, more than a little homoeroticism… Fiennes gave this interview, I forget where, and he explained that the rivalry between the two plays out like a love story. The trailer makes it sound like a good time at the movies. Instead, we get all of that, but with added interminable monologues, slipshod analogues between Rome and Now, and nothing ever resolving satisfactorily.

There are bits I liked, of course. I thought the modernized Rome was a really cool setting, and Fiennes’s son was very interesting. This was my first real exposure to Jessica Chastain (she has a really familiar face), and she was pretty okay. Vanessa Redgrave and Brian Cox were great, though, definitely the highlights of the film.

But past that? Past the actors I liked, I had a hard time staying awake for this one at 1315 on a Saturday. The accents weren’t a big deal, but the monologues were a well-delivered huge bore. It needed more of the midnight parties involving head shaving and barbershop chairs or ugly fistfights in dusty, blasted apartment buildings and less of people walking around a room, looking everyone in that room in the eye, and talking about their motivations.

The people I saw it with loved it, though. Maybe the trailer just tricked me.

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I Saw The Devil, directed by Jee-woon Kim, written by Hoon-jung Park, 2010 (Netflix): I watch a lot of these revenge movies. I had this one in my queue for months, though, before a pal talked me into watching it. Two weeks later, I finally watched it, and it was pretty okay. It stars this dude Byung-hun Lee, who I liked a whole lot in GI Joe and The Good, the Bad, the Weird. This one was pretty okay, but frustrating at the same time.

I Saw The Devil is a revenge movie with a point, which tends to be exponentially less successful than revenge movies that don’t have one. Luckily, though, the point is “Don’t go too far with your passion or everything will fall apart,” or something like that, so you get a lot of exploitative violence to go along with the cheap, unearned, and unlikely ending. In fact, while the ending is imploding in slow motion, you’re treated to shots of a new height for revenge in these revenge pictures.

But from back to front, this is a movie about a secret agent (of some sort, you only ever see him do one secret agent-y thing, other than all the revenging) hunting down the dude that killed his lady. There’s no subtlety here, near as I can tell. Lee tracks Choi Min-sik, breaks his bones, cuts his tendons, and generally goes in as far as torturing a man goes. The guy runs, then figures out who Lee is, and then goes on a rampage. Lee’s boss wants his badge and gun. Blah blah blah.

Director Jee-woon Kim takes an uncomfortable, rather than gleeful, approach to the violence. Ears get cut off, there’s gallons of blood and guts, someone’s Achilles tendon gets cut at one point… it’s cringeworthy violence, rather than “Oh MAN!” violence. But at the same time, it gets that cringe not through some type of moral point of view or anything like that. The camera leers over the stabbings and crackings. You see skin break and hear bone’s crunch. The direction is pretty effective, actually, and I’d like to see more from this guy, maybe in other genres.

The ending doesn’t work for me because so much of the movie is concerned with slow pans over trauma. The movie says one thing (“Mmm, here’s a little shocking violence!”) and the ending says another (“Mm, violence… bad idea, bros.”) and doesn’t do a good enough job to bridge the gap between the two. There’s a leap that never gets made between the spectacle and the moral. It’s aight watching, but nothing exceptional. The style of violence sets it apart from a lot of other movies in this genre, but the script isn’t good enough to keep it from feeling bland in the end.