The Good, The Bad, The Weird

Story: The paths of train robber Yoon Tae Goo (Song Kang Ho), bandit leader Park Chang Yi (Lee Byung Hun) and bounty hunter Park Do Won (Jung Woo Sung) cross over a much-coveted treasure map.
But they are not the only ones after it as the Japanese army and yet another gang of baddies have their sights set on the parchment as well in this actioner set in turbulent 1930s Manchuria.


This is a Korean take on the spaghetti Western The Good, The Bad And The Ugly (1966), the Sergio Leone classic in which three men who do not trust each other have to work together in order to get to a buried treasure.
Director Kim Jee Woon, who helmed the bloody crime drama A Bittersweet Life (2005), re-imagines the story with three of South Korea’s top male stars.
Song Kang Ho, the award-winning actor in films such as the sci-fi horror flick The Host (2006), provides some comic relief as the blustery and blustering train robber Tae Goo, who unwittingly steals the treasure map in the first place.
Versatile hunk Lee Byung Hun, whose credits include the hit thriller Joint Security Area (2000), jarringly sports earrings and eye-liner in his wild-eyed portrayal of the ruthless Chang Yi, who is out to claim the map for himself.
Heartthrob Jung Woo Sung, star of the romance A Moment To Remember (2004), is the cool and collected Do Won, who has been offered a reward for hunting down Chang Yi.
Perhaps the combined star power accounts for the success of the film, touted by the distributor here as the highest-grossing blockbuster in Korea in 2008.
But that cannot hide the fact that the thin plot merely serves to move the action along from one set-piece to another. No doubt well choreographed, but the overlong gunfights feel like exercises in excessive violence after a while.
Late-in-the-game revelations about Tae Goo are simply not enough to make you care about the thinly-drawn but quick-on-the-draw characters.
By the time of the climactic three-way shootout between the protagonists, you are strangely liberated by the fact that you do not care who lives or dies.
In another misjudged display of excess, the film refuses to end even then, but drags out for another few improbable minutes.
At its best, violence in Korean films explore issues of morality, for example in Park Chan Wook’s vengeance trilogy.
Here however, Kim seems satisfied with violence as a guns a-blazing, bullets a-whizzing end in itself, but too much shoot ’em up action leaves one as stone cold as the corpses which litter the set after a while.
So much sound and fury, signifying oh so very little.
(ST)