Drama
Testament
Angel Studios’ Testament is a, ahem, testament to the incredible acts of Jesus’ earliest followers as it follows their stories after Jesus.
Secrets, secrets are no fun, especially when that secret is a government operation to create genetically enhanced super soldiers. That’s how the saying goes, right?
Well, it’s certainly the case in South Korean thriller The Tyrant. When the United States discovers a plan by the Korean government to develop a bioweapon that can enhance human abilities, they demand that the project be shut down and all existing samples be handed over. Korea is forced to comply; the Tyrant Project is dismantled, and a handoff is arranged between representatives of the two countries.
Except Director Choe, head of Korean intelligence, isn’t willing to give up so easily.
Hitmen are hired. The handoff is disrupted, American agents are killed, and the last existing sample ends up in the hands of Ja-gyeong, Choe’s slightly unstable gun-for-hire who takes off and goes rogue.
So, who’s going to catch her first? Let the race begin.
With an intricate web of characters, each of whom have an ulterior motive and none of whom can be trusted, The Tyrant is a true espionage thriller. Alliances are formed and betrayed at the drop of a hat, and plenty of cash-filled envelopes are exchanged in seedy parking lots. Suffice it to say that there ahren’t many role models to be found in this action-packed series.
Speaking of action …when it comes to fights, The Tyrant isn’t afraid to get down and dirty. People are killed in a variety of ways —via guns, knives, car windows, you name it—and their deaths come with a fair amount of blood and gore. And then you’ve got to deal with the show’s more disturbing elements, such as torture and the threat of sexual assault. It’s a grim world these spies and hitmen live in, and they do everything in their power to make it even grimmer.
And that’s to say nothing of the foul language you’ll encounter—either listening to the English dubbed version or reading the subtitles.
The Tyrant will certainly keep you on the edge of your seat with its twists, turns and surprises. However, it may also have you flinching at a particularly bloody kill, cringing at the stream of foul language, or just wishing you were watching something else entirely.
(Editor’s Note: Plugged In is rarely able to watch every episode of a given series for review. As such, there’s always a chance that you might see a problem that we didn’t. If you notice content that you feel should be included in our review, send us an email at letters@pluggedin.com, or contact us via Facebook or Instagram, and be sure to let us know the episode number, title and season so that we can check it out.)
[Note: This review covers the English-dubbed version of the episode. Language concerns may differ slightly in the subtitled version with original Korean audio.]
A Korean intelligence director — and unofficial head of the top-secret Tyrant Project — hires a hitman to retrieve the last existing sample of a dangerous bioweapon. When gun-for-hire Ja-gyeong ends up with the sample, she becomes the target of multiple, and very dangerous, forces.
Violence, gore and plenty of blood persist throughout the episode. Several men are shot and killed, causing blood to fly. Others are stabbed, and we’re treated to images of frozen corpses and bodies covered in blood. A woman held hostage in the back of a car is nearly strangled by one of her captors. She screams, and the scene carries an implied threat of sexual violence. Ja-gyeong intervenes to save the woman by slamming the man’s face into the window of the car door: We see his face cut up and embedded with glass, and she kills him by driving the glass deeper into his neck. For good measure, she hits the man’s accomplices with her car.
A video is shown of a test subject in a tank of water; he screams, and his body explodes into a cloud of bloody water. We see hostages being hung upside-down and tortured, and we hear their screams extensively throughout the scene.
Ja-gyeong smokes a cigarette with Mo-yong, the hitman who hires her. The f-word is heard 20 times, while the s-word is heard nine times and “d–n” is heard five. “H—” and “b–ch” are each spoken three times. “A–“ is used twice, and “b—-rd” and “pr-ck” are each used once.
Lauren Cook is serving as a 2021 summer intern for the Parenting and Youth department at Focus on the Family. She is studying film and screenwriting at the University of North Carolina School of the Arts. You can get her talking for hours about anything from Star Wars to her family to how Inception was the best movie of the 2010s. But more than anything, she’s passionate about showing how every form of art in some way reflects the Gospel. Coffee is a close second.
Angel Studios’ Testament is a, ahem, testament to the incredible acts of Jesus’ earliest followers as it follows their stories after Jesus.
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