Kim Koo questions Yem's loyalty, and tells two subordinates, Myung-woo and Se-gwang, to follow him around, and to kill him if he is a spy.

The other daughter, who happens to be engaged to Kawaguchi's son, recognizes Ahn and visits her apartment, but is killed by her father Kang, Yem and a group of soldiers.

Hawaii Pistol, realizing that she can still pose as her twin, shares a kiss with Ahn, promising to meet her again in the cafe they met in Shanghai.

In 1949, a commission for war crimes investigates Yem—now a senior officer with the Korean police—who protests his innocence and points to his resistance service.

Even so, Yem is cornered on the streets by Ahn and Myung-woo, who survived his injuries earlier in the film but was rendered mute and slightly disfigured.

According to the director of the film, the character Yem Sek-jin is based on Yeom Dong-jin, the right-wing militant and founder of the White Shirts Society.

Village Voice's Simon Abrams found the film's highlights to be during its lighthearted scenes, and summarized Assassination as "the kind of overstuffed historical mega-production that Hollywood doesn't make anymore".

[32] Although lamenting the film's characters and running time, Screen Daily's Jason Bechervaise praised Choi Dong-hoon's direction and execution of the action sequences.

[34] The New York Times' Jeanette Catsoulis also praised the action scenes, but argued that the screenplay contained too many characters and surmised that "it's possible to follow [Assassination] without taking notes, but I wouldn't recommend it".

Caper Film denied those claims, rebutting that the female character in Choi's novel is not a sniper, and that assassination schemes were common in the anti-Japanese movement.

[37][38][39][40] Seoul Central District Court rejected Choi's request for an injunction to stop the film from being shown in theaters, ruling on August 19, 2015, that an abstract summary cannot be protected by copyright laws, the female protagonists in the novel and the film are "depicted in completely different ways" with the assassination plan not a major plot point in the novel, and that supporting characters Kim Koo and Kim Won-bong are real historical figures and hence cannot be viewed as a source of similarity between the two works.