The origin story may sound familiar: A young boy, orphaned after a brutal murder, grows up to fight crime under a shadowy secret identity. In Vigilante, a new Disney+ series from South Korea, the protagonist trades Batman's cape and cowl for an oversize hoodie but is driven by the same dark desire for vengeance in a world where the strong prey on the weak.
Adapted from a hugely popular Korean webtoon, director Choi Jung-yeol's Vigilante premiered at the Busan International Film Festival last month and began streaming on Disney+ and Hulu with the first two of eight episodes on Wednesday.
Fan-favorite model and actor Nam Joo-hyuk (The Light in Your Eyes, Twenty-Five Twenty-One) plays Kim Ji-yong, a helper of old ladies and top student at the national police university by day and brutal vigilante by night.
Prowling the streets, Ji-yong tracks down evildoers who have been left to run free by South Korea's soft-on-crime judicial system -- starting with his own mother's killer, who only served a sentence of 3 1/2 years.
The most galling part is that the creep shows no remorse at all, gloating that he walks free because "that's what the law decided."
"My family was ruined because of you," Ji-yong hisses as he pummels the killer in a dark alley, blood spattering across his idol-handsome face. "What kind of law is this?"
Ji-yong finds other miscreants to punish, most of whom are sneering, comic-book-level bad guys running wild in a Seoul that seems more akin to the 1970s urban hellscapes of Dirty Harry or Deathwish than a city that ranks among the safest in the world.
However, the series does reference several real-life crimes and draws on a genuine public outrage over a pattern of lenient sentencing, particularly for crimes of sexual violence.
(In one notorious example, massive public protests met the 2021 prison release of Cho Doo-soon, a convicted child rapist who served a reduced sentence of only 12 years.)
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Ratings-hungry TV reporter Choi Mi-ryeo (Kim So-jin) soon sniffs out the pattern behind the anonymous violence that Ji-yong is leaving in his wake. All the victims are perpetrators who got off easily and this mysterious figure -- whom she dubs Vigilante -- is ratings gold.
"The law's failing to punish them accordingly and someone's punishing them with violence," she rails operatically at her inept boss. "People want a dark hero like this person."
Revenge stories are a staple of Korean dramas, and much of the action across the first two episodes seems meant as a catharsis -- a theme that has been explored in other recent films such as Netflix's Ballerina, which also premiered at the Busan film fest.
However, complications start to arise when Ji-yong crosses boundaries at the police academy to access criminal records and Mi-ryeo begins taking an active role in drawing the Vigilante out. As the mysterious dark figure becomes a national hero for a crime-weary nation, he also draws the attention of Jo Heon (Oldboy's Yoo Ji-tae), a musclebound cop who plays by his own rules and is determined to take the Vigilante down.
Beyond the opening episodes, things get even dicier when copycat vigilantes begin appearing, including one who seems to be coming from Ji-yong's inner circle, and questions about the ethics of taking the law into your own hands grow more pointed.
While South Korea has delivered massive streaming hits to several platforms, Vigilante's creators and Disney+ are hoping that their series catches on with global audiences in a relatively new genre.
"Now is the time to have a [well-made] Korean action hero series, and Vigilante could be the one," actor Yoo said at a press event earlier this week.
The first two episodes of Vigilante stream Wednesday on Disney+ and Hulu. Two new episodes will be released weekly.