Most reviews said that the plot was terrible and the director was a try hard with the artistic effects and poor action scenes but I tried it anyways because I was craving some badass noir with lots of action and hotness.
Acting from Kim Soo Hyun was 20/10, I was very impressed. He deserves far more movies and he obviously can handle dark/serious material. The international market needs a man like him as well, hello people. Everyone fit into their roles so no issue there, it's just pathetic that the director didn't use them as well as he did with KSMH, and even there that's just because the man is talented enough to pull double his own weight.
The plot was so poor it took more than half of the movie before you realized the parts all of the leads had potentially and then the last 30 minutes before you saw the plot's protagonist, the drug. By then it was too late to see where the drug had been foreshadowed and was a bit of a wtf even when you did care to think about it. It was far too weakly intertwined throughout the story for its importance to the whole scenario. You were also playing around with two MCs and apparently a third aka the real's alter ego who kept on popping up without any reasonable explanation which just made it all more confusing.
The fake and real were poorly managed as in how strongly they were to lead the plot and their relationship with one another. It started off with it being all about the real which is expected, then drifted into it being entirely about the fake even though real should still have been significant considering how the plot progressed, and then the very last scene is a ridiculous spiritual moment between the two which is stupid because they were never allowed enough interactions to get to that point. Kim Soo Hyun was outstanding as both, but it was obvious that his "real" character had so much more drive as a CHARACTER just by how it was written compared to the fake, but he wasn't given enough screen time to live it up. The potential the two characters could have had was sadly disappointed.
The two good scenes were the real/fake bathroom scene and Sulli's last moments with the fake because of the personal interactions going on; very important aspects to any movie because the characters are the life of stories.
The explicit scenes were rather meh imo. KSH and Sulli are beautiful people and were v pleasing to watch together but it was either not enough or the chemistry wasn't given enough coverage.
The director seemed carried away in his fascination with drugged up realities so all his artistic shots reflected that, but that was also unimpressive because it was so obvious and almost exaggerated. Even his action shots were attempts at art ugh. He had many "symbolic" shots which were either so drawn out or obvious that it basically took effort to connect it to a story that lacked any plot depth.