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Lizards in Movies
 
Yaksha: Ruthless Operations (2022)
 
Spoiler Alert !

Some of these pictures and descriptions may give away plot details that you might not want to know before watching the film.
 
This is a good Korean spy/action movie about Ji-hoon (Park Hae-soo) a prosecutor who was sent to China to investigate a team of rogue agents. It includes several scenes with a large pet lizard.

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When Ji-hoon gets to the Chinese spy agency headquarters, he is startled to see a large lizard crawling on the floor at his feet. He stands up, shocked. The lizard's owner Jung-dae (Park Jin-young) tells him not to worry, the lizard is not poisonous. Then he picks up the lizard, calls it Lizzie, and chastises it for getting out, threatening to put a leash on it. We see a large glass terrarium in the headquarters where he keeps Lizzie.

Later, after some bad guys blow up their headquarters, we see Jung-dae worried about Lizzie. We see Jung-dae in gun battles shooting up the enemy, and he is very hostile to Ji-hoon, so showing him with a pet is probably meant to humanize him.

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We find out that Lizzy survived the explosion when we see her in a car that Ji-hoon is driving. Lizzy crawls up between the two front seats, startling the passenger. Ji-hoon, now an expert on the lizard, tells her she's not poisonous, then tells the lizard to get down, as if it understands human language. The scene is very low-key, but I think it's supposed to be funny.

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One more time, during the ending credits, we see Lizzy on the dashboard of a car driven by Jung-dae somewhere in the American southwest after his group disbanded, as he gets a phone call about getting the group back together.


Lizzie appears to be an Argentine Black and White Tegu, a lizard native to South America that is available in the pet trade, and has become an invasive species in Florida. Left to wander unleashed inside buildings and cars, Lizzy is one accidentally unclosed door away from becoming feral herself.