Disgusted by the dirty work of his last assignment, Min has walked away from the agency. He also has a terminal brain tumor. Weirdly, that makes him the perfect candidate to serve as Seobok’s bodyguard. If he can keep the clone alive, he gets first dibs on a Seobok mojo-extracting treatment.
Of course, that will be the tricky part. A shadowy cabal already assassinated the American scientist evaluating the Seobok project and the clone himself is presumed to be their next target. However, Seobok (named after a Qin Dynasty messenger dispatched to find the elixir of life) is hardly helpless. It turns out he has massive Professor X-like telekinetic powers that were an unanticipated byproduct of his radical genetic engineering.
Lee is working with a familiar template (cynical government agent learns to respect the humanity in the guinea pig is tasked with protecting), but the action sequences are crisply executed and Gong Yoo is remarkably haggard and world-weary as Min, despite his babyface. The problem is Seobok (portrayed with utter emotionlessness by Park Bo-gum) truly has the personality of a lab rat. The silent steeliness thing works much better for Jo Woo-jin as the sinister intelligence chief Ahn Ik-hyun. However, some of the best dramatic work comes from Jang Young-nam as Lim Se-eun, Seobok’s surrogate mother and project scientist.
Nevertheless, Seobok is confidently paced and the big blowout finish is better realized than half the stuff you see in branded-world superhero movies. Okay rather than awesome, Seobok screens as an on-demand selection of this year’s Fantasia.
