‘The Surgeon’ Review: Michelle Yeoh Doctors a Gang of Mobsters to Death in a Fun Little Action Movie That Gets by on Its Grossness

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It’s been 18 years since “Taken” came out, and bad guys still haven’t learned not to fuck with — older, seemingly harmless — people who have a very special set of skills. Rarely have those skills been more special, or at least more specialized, than they are in Roshan Sethi’s “The Surgeon,” a sedate but gruesome action thriller in which sixtysomething Michelle Yeoh violates the Hippocratic Oath with extreme prejudice after some gangsters kidnap her to operate on their boss (Martin Freeman, selling the crime lord schtick better than you might expect from Bilbo Baggins). The movie is a few cuts short of a lasting suture, but it’s mighty fun to watch Yeoh prove her character’s point that “Surgery is precise violence.”

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We never learn a single detail about why Eliza Lim decided to devote her life to medicine, but the film’s opening flashback — in which a younger version of Yeoh’s role sits apart from her colleagues and brutally eviscerates a blood orange so that she can sew it up again — suggests that she wouldn’t know what to do with a social life if she had one. Cut to: Four decades later, and Eliza is being forced into retirement because the hospital can’t afford the liability. They say that after 60, the wrists start to shake. (Karan Soni, star of Sethi’s “A Nice Indian Boy,” has an amusing voice cameo as the State Farm agent responsible for insuring each of Eliza’s hands). But our heroine, who’s clearly still possessed by the superhuman poise that Yeoh has weaponized across her brilliant career, is unconvinced. After doing everything in her power to save people’s lives for so long, she can’t stomach the thought of just waiting for herself to die.

Lucky for her, she may not have to wait as long as she thinks. She’s only been off the job for a few days before some goons snatch her out of her kitchen one morning and take her to a derelict hospital where their boss is already prepped for surgery in the operating theater. Eliza doesn’t know the patient’s name, let alone what’s wrong with him, but it’s clear that she’ll be killed if she doesn’t start cutting into his belly soon.

Actually, it’s clear that she’ll be killed even if she does start cutting into his belly right away, and so — at gunpoint, and under the watchful eye of a goon nurse who can tell what she’s doing — Eliza has to figure out a way to save two lives at once. She never had a problem telling her terminal patients that they should embrace the inevitable and die with dignity, but it turns out that some things are easier said than done. She may not be ready to shuffle off this mortal coil just because she no longer has a job to keep her busy.

Clearly born from and benefited by the writer-director’s own experience in medicine (he’s still a practicing radiation oncologist, and one of the best jokes in his latest movie is that he’s billed in the end credits as “Roshan Sethi M.D.”), the first half of “The Surgeon” operates as a blood-soaked game of chicken. How many complications can Eliza introduce into the surgery before her trigger-happy captors get frustrated enough to shoot the only person in town who’s able and “willing” to remove their boss’ tumor?

The pace is slacker than it should be and the tension not quite thick enough to cut with a scalpel, but Sethi, much like his protagonist, knows exactly what buttons to press — or what arteries to sever — to keep Eliza in control. He knows that surgeons have their own petty eccentricities (Eliza has to listen to the music of Thin Lizzy while she operates), and he knows that perforating a person’s bowel can kill them in a heartbeat. He also knows that most people don’t know these things, and his movie derives consistent pleasure from seeing how far Eliza can weaponize the bad guys’ medical ignorance against them. Pretty far, it turns out, but not always far enough.

It’s only when the villains finally call her bluff and force the doctor to abandon her whole “do no harm” thing that Sethi’s film is able to mature into its ultimate form: A stiff but satisfying enough action thriller in which Eliza uses her training to slice her enemies in all the right places. The action is minimal and contained enough to forget that Yeoh is one of the greatest stunt performers and screen fighters in movie history (much as her discipline and precision as an actress are on full display), but she’s not playing a supercop here. She’s playing an old and wounded retiree who’s never killed anyone on purpose before.

To that point, “The Surgeon” is at its best whenever it embraces the strengths and limitations that her character brings to the table. Eliza doesn’t just beat somebody up; she slices the exact tendons that prevent them from being able to pick up a gun. She doesn’t just swing wildly at a mob thug’s groin in order to get away from him; she cuts the muscle that holds together his pelvis. As the “precise violence” Eliza practices escalates closer to “John Wick” territory, the film occasionally shows a kind of “Surgeon Vision” that lets us see her opponents the way she does: as a veritable treasure map of tissues and organs to target for maximum damage. There isn’t a ton of action in the movie, but boy does Eliza make every incision count.

What “The Surgeon” lacks in bloodshed — and energy — it makes up for in sheer grossness, knowing full well that Eliza’s superpower is that she doesn’t flinch at the kind of body horror that could make a grown man faint to the ground. Did we really need the flashback scene where Eliza salts a prolapsed anus in order to prove that point? (“Why would an anus fall out like that?” her colleague wonders aloud.) Probably not, but it sure gets the job done.

It also tees up the movie’s climactic setpieces, awkwardly spread across the final third of the story. “The Surgeon” never finds a clean groove for itself, and the movie falls apart like bad stitchwork whenever it slows down long enough for the audience to offer a second opinion (or even to ask themselves why Freeman’s gang is so intent on killing Eliza, though I suppose a mobster without someone to hurt is as lost as a surgeon without someone to heal), but every time Yeoh doctors someone to death, it’s enough to make the whole audience groan in delight. “That’s not snot,” she says after puncturing a hole in someone’s nostrils, “that’s your brain fluid.” That random bad guy might need it to survive, but “The Surgeon” gets better with every drop of the stuff it loses along the way.