The duelist is a period movie, set during the late Chosun dynasty era. I watched this movie solely because of the lead actors. Although the actors delivered, but the movie didn't. The plot is quite difficult and intricate; its easy to get lost. It took me a while to grasp just what was going on! It starts off slow, but picks up towards the middle, when we finally get a hint of romance(The lead actor is totally gorgeous by the way ^_^). The movie features quite a bit of sword fighting, but not the martial-arts-movie kind; its more of an artistic fight. Freeze frames have been used quite a lot.

To sum it up, the movie was average for me, it got my hopes up in the middle; but it just didn't follow through. The story was not straightforward and it had me confused a lot of times. You should watch it for beautifully choreographed fight sequences; they were definitely the highlight.