After seeing so many good South Korean films over the last few years I was disappointed with The Good, The Bad, The Weird. The films from the far east that are given international releases are normally very good (why bother releasing bad ones?) and since the turn of the century the South Korean film industry has caught up with the quality, if not the quantity, of Japanese and Chinese films being released in The West. The reason films from these countries are so popular internationally is because they are so different; ‘Oldboy’ and ‘Spring. Summer, Autumn, Winter...and Spring’ are like nothing else made in America or Europe.
Originality is their strongest asset, and this is why TGTBTW fails. As the title suggests, it’s basically a mash-up (or homage, or whatever) of Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns. Set in the Wild East, specifically Manchuria circa 1930, it’s a story about bandits running around robbing trains, riding horses and having shootouts. The film itself is good and bad and weird in equal measure, it plays out thusly:
opening dialogue, train robbery, dialogue, shootout, dialogue, horse riding sequence, dialogue, shootout, dialogue, massive horse riding shootout, dialogue, final shoot out, end.
It’s relentless. This film is a victim of its own ambition. though it crosses genres, above all it’s a big budget action comedy, the South Korean equivalent of a Brett Ratner film perhaps, only with characters who are even more one-dimensional. To begin, the tone of the film suggests that all the characters are intentionally under written so they don’t get in the way of the fun and high jinks, but then after the frantic first hour , a couple of character defining scenes occur which only serve to remind the audience how little we care about them. The Good and The Bad are really The Wooden, no matter how stern their glances. This film really belongs to The Weird played by a dude called Song Kang-ho (who along with the guy who played Oldboy must be South Korea’s finest thespian). It’s clear his capability as a comic actor is far greater that anything this film provides.
So, avoid Korean comedy, but consume Korean horror and drama as though it were finest kimchi.
No comments:
Post a Comment