I enjoyed this film a lot--it was always interesting, if not entirely satisfying, and hit the ground running from the very beginning.
Within its first few minutes, the film brutally kills off who I had presumed to be female lead (it turns out she was--much of the film is made up of flashbacks). It caught me off guard, and I've found that if a film can surprise you in some way early on, it's a great way to grab your attention and get you invested in the story. After this, the film is split fairly evenly between flashbacks leading up to the murder and scenes exploring the aftermath. In the flashbacks, the male and female leads fall in love, which lures him away from his life as a gangster. The general idea of this storyline is clichéd, to be sure, but it is given enough time and handled deftly enough that the scenes feel genuine, not contrived. Knowing what is ultimately going to happen makes these flashbacks walk an extremely fine line between bittersweet and flat out depressing, to the point that I was sometimes unsure which was the dominant emotion. Regardless, this added an extra dimension to the scenes that I was able to appreciate.
The present day scenes follow both the male lead (as he seeks to track down the murderer) and the murderer himself (exploring his life and why he does what he does). These scenes have their fair share of plot twists, but bring little new to the table. The question of whether a hero will fall back into his former bad ways when confronted by evil is a question that has been asked by many other films, and there is little original in this film's approach. The film ends up going for a bittersweet happy ending. A lot of plot threads have to come together in a particular way to make this ending possible. They're all set up, so I wouldn't say the film cheats, but much of it seems a little too convenient to be fully satisfying.
While the present day scenes do not have much originality to them, they are still done competently and are entertaining. It is the surprising opening and the unique quality of the flashback scenes that make the film stand out.
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