60
The New York Times by A.O. Scott
This crowd-pleasing spectacle is like a series of showstopper sequences from a musical without much attention paid to the story that is supposed to hold it all together.
What are people saying?
What are critics saying?
50
Christian Science Monitor by David Sterritt
The action of this South Korean melodrama is fast and furious, but its emotions and ideas don't manage to keep up.
40
Lee's trickery is dazzling in flashes but also monotonously strenuous -- the derangement factor is high but there's little evidence of authentic lunacy.
75
New York Daily News by Elizabeth Weitzman
Lee pushes this joyride into stimulation overdrive, playing with colors and film speeds and surfaces and shadows until it makes perfect sense that a movie should be all about energy, rather than -- well, about anything else at all.
50
With a little more plot, this could have been a killer.
60
Chicago Reader by Lisa Alspector
Images about imagery can be diverting, even insightful, but this painterly 1999 feature piles up studies in elaborately choreographed motion that are their own reason for being.
50
San Francisco Chronicle by Mick LaSalle
A Korean film that takes an American genre and gets fancy with it.
63
USA Today by Staff [Not Credited]
The script's clichés have nowhere to hide.
60
Lee can't tell a story to save his life, but he's something of a visual magician, laying out glittering piles of goodies that you instinctively want to follow.
58
Seattle Post-Intelligencer by William Arnold
The characters are uniformly repulsive, the cliche-ridden script builds no real tension or psychological interest, and the bottom line is that Lee's innovative but ultimately tedious and even ludicrous MTV-style visuals add absolutely nothing to the story dynamics.