Powerful

I didn’t really have many expectations going into the movie (good or bad), but I actually really enjoyed it. I really liked the characters and the banter between them.

Not sure how, but this is easily one of the best movies all summer. Multiple levels of funny, never takes itself seriously, super colorful, and creative.

There's a more than satisfactory amount of boom-boom in the movie's trim running time.

Saw this recently on a rented DVD. What an amazing action flick man. The plot - After accidentally killing a young girl during a hit, the hit-man is traumatized by the event. Soon, he is assigned by his contractors to then eliminate the young girl's mother, causing further conflict for the damaged hit-man. Expectations were high as this is from the same director, Lee Jeong-beom who gav us The Man from Nowhere. Jang Dong-gun (My Way) gav a stunning performance as the haunted and complex hit-man. His action choreography was awesome. The films many violent action scenes are quite well executed. In short, this is a very stylish, emotional, high octane action flick. The action sticks to blazing shootouts, some slick close-quarter-combat - brutal n engaging, and some knife play. Most of the action is towards the second half of the film. The rooftop shoot-out is one of the best action sequence. The gunshots scenes, especially the shot gun scenes were violent n blazing. (Myself a fan of shot gun action sequences). Fans of Michael Mann n John Woo will love the gun action scenes. Fans of Heat, Miami vice (final shoot-out), The getaway (Steve Mcqueen one), Hard boiled, The killer, Tombstone, etc will definitely enjoy this.

A simple plot: a hit-man accidentally kills a little girl and is then sent to put the mother out of her misery.So, how can this possibly go wrong? After the explosive beginning, the pace drops off almost to the point of tedium as we're supposed to feel the agony of characters we never quite connect with. There's something about Triad bank accounts worth around $100 million thrown in to motivate the gangsters and throw some cops into the mix, but it's so poorly put together that - if it couldn't have been fixed via a couple of rewrites - really should have been taken out.Fortunately, 40 minutes or so in, the action kicks off again and it's the excellence we all sat down to watch in the first place.Now, I'm all for catering for genre fans, just as I'm all for making deep, meaningful thrillers, but unfortunately, the plotting doesn't quite have the plausibility or pacing to be the powerful action-thriller the director was hoping it would be and in the end, despite all the great action scenes, No Tears For the Dead left me feeling detached and out in the cold.

People constantly ask me in my media class why do I watch foreign films, to reply I show them the trailer to this film as well as a couple of others.This film is among my favourite action films up there with the likes of The Raid 2.The film follows a hit-man that just wants to get out of the game after accidentally killing a young girl but instead of being left alone his employer asks him to kill the mother of the girl he killed. While being a simple plot it is used as a way to discuss themes such as the grief attached to the loss of a loved one and the job of parents.The character's of the hit-man (Gon) and his target (Mo-gyeong) are both well drawn out and complex, each suffering and dealing with it in there own ways.The action sequences are some of the best I have seen outside of The Raid films. One scene in an apartment block shows a incredible knife fight as well as a dramatic shootout that seem all to real for what we see on the news.While you could accuse the film of having some pacing issues after the first ten minutes of the film I see it as a pay off and believe me after the first hour you will be rewarded with incredible action and brilliant character moments.To say No Tears For The Dead is better than The Man From Nowhere (Done by the same director) would be incorrect. However this film is still incredible and is worth watching if you like Korean cinema and want to see a realistic bloody action thriller with some dark moments that you don't often see in western productions.

NO TEARS FOR THE DEAD is yet another addition to an exemplary list of South Korean action thrillers made in the last decade; such titles include THE BERLIN FILE, THE MAN FROM NOWHERE, A BITTERSWEET LIFE, A COMPANY MAN, and THE SUSPECT. I was long excited for this film as soon as I found out it was a follow-up to the same director's THE MAN FROM NOWHERE, which is one of my all-time favourites.NO TEARS FOR THE DEAD isn't quite up there with the standard of the earlier film, but it has its moments. This is an exciting story that mixes superbly-shot, hard-hitting action sequences with a tragic human drama at the core. It's dark indeed, featuring heartfelt performances from the central actors who are inevitably playing broken characters, and it's fun to see how the tone shifts from adrenaline-pumping action to gut-wrenching emotion and back again.The storyline is predictable for the genre: an assassin screws up by failing to take out his intended victim, only to face the wrath of his former employers. The action is blistering, with lightning fast editing and gobbets of grisly violence. But the human drama also draws you in, building to a moving but expected ending. The South Koreans have come up trumps again with this one.