As the kidnappings progress, the men get more and more powerful and the initial solid revenge plot becomes more conscience troubling. It begins hence to revolve around the man leading this sort of vigilante squad with a penchant of staging the perfect scenes for their execution in cinematic styles - posing as political terrorists, cops and so on with costumes and sets. This factor is almost a play on the revenge movie in itself. Nevertheless, for the first part of the feature the violence unravels at rapid and relentless succession. We hardly get five minutes straight of no one getting beat up or bloodied.
Still in all this, despite the vast variety of characters, we get to take a closer look at the lives of each of the individuals involved in the storylines with careful vignettes that reveal a side to them that succeeds in adding a third dimension to each one of them. Therefore, we understand their motivations. The men who murdered the girl were following orders. The men and woman who seek revenge are frustrated in their own way - from the homeless man who must care for his ill old mother to the woman who loves a man that mistreats and beats her but makes love to her just right. One on One in this sense becomes a tale of socio political unhappiness, one that carries the Kim Ki Duk air of seriousness and stylised violence that is expected from him.
However, it is a far cry from his more impressive works. The structure of the film is repetitive and for this reason tiring. As the squad makes scales its way through the top by taking care of one man after the other, we eventually get to a point where we long to see the inevitable final confrontation, seemingly delayed in favour of subplots vignettes that add to character depth but delay plot developments in frustrating ways. More disappointingly, the cinematography is unusually careless much like the dialogue that seems all too obvious and perhaps even underdeveloped.
Despite the fact that Kim Ki Duk will say that these are all calculated stylistic choices, it is hard not to think that perhaps One On One was a little rushed and that in this sense his prolific ways are not unlike the ones of a radically opposed filmmaker such as Woody Allen as far as qualitative ups and downs are concerned. All in all One On One is gripping and intense, but lenient towards frustrating re-iteration. Much like his previous works, it is bound to split the audience in half but even fans will struggle to rank this latest work of his among his best.
