Dir. Kim Jee-Woon, 2005, Korea, 120 mins, subtitles
Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Shin Mina, Kim Young Chul
In his last film, A Tale Of Two Sisters, director Kim Jee-Woon turned the horror genre inside-out, crafting a twisty-turny narrative that totally undermined the audience’s sense of reality. Now he’s taken on the gangster pic, but anyone expecting similar pyrotechnics is going to be disappointed – this is a much more straightforward tale. In fact, it’s an old chestnut: dapper troubleshooter, Sunwoo, is asked by a Mr Big to look after his wayward girlfriend. But Sunwoo takes her side in affairs of the heart and finds himself on the receiving end of a bitter – and extremely violent – retribution.
Kim knows how to deliver a compelling, exciting and often wryly humorous entertainment. There’s a terrific gallery of rogues in this film, from Kim Young-Chul’s ice-cool boss man to Kim Roi-Ha’s shaggy-haired bouncer. But it’s Whang Jung-Min’s performance as an uncontrollable son that steals the show, his offhand sadism recalling Joe Pesci in Goodfellas. The action sequences are handled with tremendous flair, although, of course, they’re so wildly-over-the-top as to almost generate laughter. As is typical of this kind of movie, the hero has to endure so much physical punishment, the viewer is left wondering whether the modern thriller is not, as they say, gratuitously violent but rather gratuitously masochistic. And while we’re at it, how many times can a man be shot, beaten over the head and buried alive and still be able to win the day with a well-aimed kick? Perhaps a medical advisor should be on set in future to advise on human stamina…
But this is the formula that most moviegoers recognise these days, the one where the good guys can always rise wearily to their feet and fight another day. And therein lies the problem with Kim’s film – it doesn’t offer anything new. Since Old Boy and Sympathy For Mr Vengeance, we seem to be inundated with violent, provocative thrillers from the East, which are all very polished and amusing but increasingly familiar and predictable. Kim tries to spice up the mix with a light-hearted coda that suggests either a new angle on the hero or that his story is the dream of a mind preoccupied with macho posturing. But it’s all too little, too late. Instead, Bittersweet Life feels like someone has pieced together a jigsaw of great set-pieces and narrative twists without imbuing the whole picture with its own distinctive vision. The country’s cinema output is considered by many to be the new event in world cinema, but if Korea is to take its place at the top, it needs to be represented by more adventurous, more original product than this.
Mike Bartlett
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