On the screen, Gary Cooper's weary marshal stood alone; stalked through his empty town by four implacable killers, he had taken refuge in a barn, and now the bad guys had set it on fire.
Scenes are short and economical, there's no music, and hardly a hint of Coen eccentricity peeping through the story of an implacable, methodical killer (Javier Bardem, also an Oscar-winner) and, in a trio of pursuers and pursued, sheriff Tommy Lee Jones and Josh Brolin, a regular guy who has stumbled upon millions after a drug-deal shootout.
I eventually outgrew my fear of implacable force-of-nature killers, and I never lost sleep over humanoids from the deep, or murderous, severed hands, but I didn't lose my fear of people.
Their personalities, their beliefs, their decision making, their hubris or lack of it: none of this matters when the enemy is an implacable and inhuman foe like the Killer Vines, who not only try to ensnare all of Mr. Smith's characters, but also succeed in choking his novel to death.
He's also got souped up infrared vision, killer instincts, and an implacable hatred for humanity.
Publishing still images of the moment of death, or running video from the live show or the gunman's Twitter feed shows viewers what the killer wanted us to see: himself an implacable instrument of death; his victims terrified and dishevelled.
Seeing Mr. Choi as a comical lecher in "The Quiet Family" may be particularly surprising for American viewers who know him as the emblem of implacable Korean violence from Park Chan-wook's "Oldboy," a role he fills again as the serial killer in "I Saw the Devil".
But the piece will generate enormous traffic & editorial norms are extremely weak in the face of the implacable logic of competitive markets Sean Penn infiltrated a dangerous Mexican drug cartel leading to the apprehension of a wanted killer and everyone's criticizing his prose?
