Mantis

The Startup Hustle of the Modern Hitman

Being excellent at a job you should never have taken has its own special fatigue. *Kill Boksoon* understood that beautifully in 2023, turning professional assassination into another branch of corporate burnout. The spin-off *Mantis* tries to push that idea into younger, hungrier territory. MK Entertainment has collapsed, the market is wide open, and suddenly the gig economy has arrived for contract killers. Everybody in this movie looks like they are scrambling for scraps after a start-up implosion.



Director Lee Tae-sung, who served as an assistant director on the first film, clearly gets the layout of this universe. What he wants to add is the language of start-up culture, which is a strange but not uninteresting fit for a movie full of neck stabbings. Han-ul, played by Yim Si-wan with oily charm and a nasty streak, comes back from vacation to find the old order gone. Instead of signing up with another company, he decides to go founder mode and build something of his own. The metaphor for youth unemployment and chaebol dominance in South Korea is sitting right there. The film does not always know what to do with it. Sometimes the social commentary clicks; sometimes you just want the knife fight to be a knife fight.

There is a stretch in the middle where rival factions try to negotiate, fail, and collapse into a room-wide brawl. That scene tells you what kind of movie *Mantis* really wants to be. Action director Ryu Seong-cheol trades the sleek gunplay of *Kill Boksoon* for blades, blunt force, and a much messier rhythm. Han-ul's dual sickles look cool, but Yim wisely refuses to make him seem untouchable. He comes off as talented and just a little too pleased with himself. When the dust settles, he is not standing there like a mythic assassin. He is bent over, chest heaving, looking like a department head who barely survived a quarterly review.



The problem for the movie is that Han-ul is not its most interesting person. That honor belongs to Park Gyu-young's Jae-yi, a childhood friend and blacklisted assassin trying to claw her way back into relevance. Park steals scene after scene with the kind of quiet intelligence that makes louder performances feel wasteful. I remembered her from Netflix's *Celebrity*, where she played a different sort of social climber. Here, she holds the film's emotional center. There is a wonderful moment when she watches Han-ul make a terrible business choice involving the irritating venture capitalist Benjamin (Choi Hyun-wook). Her jaw tightens, her eyes flash with pity and calculation, and then the mask drops back into place. It's tiny, but it tells you everything.

If *Mantis* has a fatal weakness, it is the script's inability to recognize that Jae-yi is the person we actually want to follow. The film keeps yanking our attention back toward Han-ul's entrepreneur fantasy and leaving her richer storyline half-finished. Paul Bramhall at CityOnFire put it plainly: "for a movie to give its name to the least interesting character is a serious misstep."



Even so, I had a hard time writing the film off completely. The choreography is good enough to survive a fair amount of narrative wobble, and there is something appealing about how scrappy it all is. *Mantis* never matches the prestige gravity of its predecessor, but as a blood-splattered story about the kids fighting over the wreckage after the old guard falls, it has a nasty little pulse.