Review: The Divine Fury (2019)
This week I watched The Divine Fury because it was advertised to me as a movie about an MMA fighter with a demon hand—which, yeah, that sounds like something I can get into. What I did not know is that’s it exactly, except in a “In the name of the Lord, I will end you” kind of way; so this is a good time to mention that I'm not knowledgeable about the Catholic faith and I've never seen Constantine. With that in mind, The Divine Fury delivers on the front of being a clear good vs. evil plot with a few good, clean action sequences. But for how strong it is conceptually, the execution leaves something to be desired.
The story follows Yonghu (Park Seojoon), an undefeated MMA fighter who's also actively rejected God ever since the tragic death of his father as a child. Writer and director Kim Joohwan takes this latter part pretty seriously, to a point that Yonghu's faith is a consistent topic throughout the movie. This is initiated by a priest telling him that, if he prays hard while his father is hospitalized, then God will surely hear him—but Yonghu's prayers seem to go unheard when his father dies that night.
Cut to 20 years later, and we can assume a traumatized and Godless Yonghu would be an absolute mad dog in the ring, but who can say for certain when there's one MMA fight in the movie. Granted, he does go overboard after seeing his opponent's full-back tattoo of Christ, but that's later revealed to be intervention by the Dark Bishop—the demon responsible for his father's death. This is the wildest Yonghu gets in a fight, however, and for the rest of the movie he seems to be inconvenienced at worst, which indicates that the overall premise of The Divine Fury sounds a little more badass on paper than in practice.
When a puncture wound stigmata appears in his right hand with seemingly no diagnosis, Yonghu finds out it's a God-given weapon against evil when he unwittingly aids a priest in an exorcism gone awry. This priest, Father Ahn (Ahn Sungki), happens to be searching for the Dark Bishop as well, and the two form an unlikely bond despite Yonghu’s reluctance to hear Father Ahn's blathering about how one can't hate without truly loving—a hard jab at Yonghu's lack of faith signaling that he'd once believed with his whole heart. This character relationship lends itself well to one of my favorite tropes, wherein a young person who's lost hope finds a mentor who comes to love them, which I call "falling in dad." However, this falling-in-dad scenario falls a little short on its delivery because, while there's plenty of screentime of them chatting, there's not really a point where they seem to connect beyond acquaintanceship, and I probably wouldn't consider it to be falling-in-dad at all if it weren't for their willingness to die for one another.
Meanwhile, the Dark Bishop's lead vessel, Jisin (Woo Dohwan), does as he's told in terms of possessing other people, finding sacrifices, allowing himself to become a muscular, scaly final boss, etc. But there's no clear objective in mind, and when his handsome face is all that’s leading a five-minute conversation about nothing, things start to feel a bit slow. This is all a matter of preference, of course. The Divine Fury is largely telling the facts (disjointed as they may be) rather than showing, and that makes for a pretty easy viewing experience.
Visually, The Divine Fury is a good watch, but not mind-blowing. For how grandiose the premise is, the movie actually becomes kind of stale given its long conversational shots and relatively few action sequences—which are fun to watch when they appear, by the way—but the inevitable victory against the Devil is a bit lackluster. Ironically, while I didn’t get super into this movie, it managed to draw me in at the very last second by announcing a sequel with the secondary exorcist, Father Choi (Choi Wooshik). So while I don’t necessarily agree with the overall execution of the thing, I instantly found myself looking forward to how they’ll expand on it, though there’s currently no update on when that sequel might be.
Edited by Aleena Faisal