Any list of the best vengeance thrillers of recent vintage has to include Park Chan-Wook’s “Oldboy” and
Hans Petter Moland’s “In Order of Disappearance.” Add your favorite here, because there are lots of examples through film history, movies about a great wrong that one furious character — most often a man — sets out to right, one malefactor at a time.

I’m thinking Korean writer-director Chung-Hyun Lee’s “Ballerina” is worth adding to that conversation, and not just because our avenger is a pint-sized pixie who punches well above her weight. The set-piece fights are epic, the “clean house” shoot-out is John Woo-sized and hell, this tiny dancer packs a flame thrower.

Jeon Jong-seo of “The Call” plays Ok-ju, not the “dancer” of the title, just the dancer’s friend. But as we’ve seen in the convenience store hold-up she interrupts in the opening scene, Ok-ju has her own special skills, her own way of staying en pointe.

She pummels and generally just messes up four hoodlums, deflecting and neutralizing their knives with cans off the shelf, kicking ass and paying her tab on the way out.

Later, her friend Min hee (Park Yu-rim) calls her over, and a box of wrapped ballet slippers are on the bed, a gift with a note — “Please avenge me!” Min-hee was mixed up with something, and someone. And the consequences of it caused her to take her own life.

There’s nothing for it but for Ok-ju to honor that last request and track down whoever did this. As flashbacks show us how the two met, how Min hee got into dancing while Ok-ju found a life in “security” work, we see where we’re going.

No private eye, bodyguard or “agent” or whatever Ok-ju is can rest until their friend’s killer is brought to justice — rough justice.

The suspect is perfunctorily narrowed down to long-haired, handsome and Lamborghini/gated estate-rich Choi (Kim Ji-hoon of “Money Heist: Korea”). Our villain is into BDSM, Ok-ju discovers.

But setting a trap for him is the easy part. Bringing him down is going to take more than one fight, villainous accomplices who must be dealt with and it might require some inside help.

I really like Chung-Hyun Lee’s debut thriller, “The Call,” a supernatural murder mystery. Here, he’s got a story stripped to the basics — kicking ass and breaking glass…that you shove in somebody’s mouth when they won’t talk.

The action scenes are shot and cut with brio — frenetic. The violence is over-the-top, so much so that every scene that lacks it feels slow. Set pieces in the kinky hotel our bad guy likes to take his BDSM victims to (he drugs them with his designer fish ampules) for his videotaped fantasies, in a drug lab and in a rich mobster’s riding stables deliver.

And there’s even time in this generally brisk thriller for a pause for a little humor. Gun shopping in Korea is a hit-or-miss affair, with our dealers here an elderly couple who sell out of a sideshow balloon-popping-with-pistols van. The old man pushes revolvers and a deringer. The old lady doesn’t mess around. Flame thrower.

The knives come out, the blood spills and sprays and the complications are mere afterthoughts in this march towards one last murder. A few plot lapses aside, it’s a lot of fun. And if it isn’t the best vengeance thriller in the age of four John Wick films, it deserves a place at the table and a mention in the conversation.

Rating: TV-MA, bloody violence, drug and BDSM content, profanity

Cast: Jeon Jong-seo, Kim Ji-hoon,
Park Yu-rim

Credits: Scripted and directed by Chung-Hyun Lee. A Netflix release.

Running time: 1:34