Il buono, il matto, il cattivo

Of the few Korean films i have seen , the best word to describe them all is eccentric and The Good The Bad & The Weird certainly lives up to that. This movie looks fantastic , almost epic like and you can see a lot of money was spent on the set . It really does have the feel of a western and the three main characters are all very interesting in their own right. The story is a simple one , three men ( and their cronies) are after a treasure map and they will do anything to get hold of it. The minus points of this film are that its half an hour too long and that at times it's to frenetic. Because of the constant action you get a little bombarded with it after a while. On the whole i enjoyed this film but im not too sure i would ever watch it again.

The Manchurian desert in the 1930's has become the Asian cinematic version of the American West. A number of action films have been set here but this is the first to make an outright reference to a classic western that I've seen. While taking off from Leone's "The Good, The Bad and The Ugly" this film goes in it's own direction although the mix of horses, trains, motorcycles, Chinese and Western costumes and some very odd characters makes this film resemble the Mad Max films more than anything else. An extended chase scene towards the end really seems influenced by the George Miller films.

Influences aside, the ingenuity in crafting the action scenes in this film makes it a joy to watch. Photography is great. The lead actors are good and the story while a little daft is easy to follow for the most part.The music is good but nowhere near the Leone films. The violence is typical for Korean action and might be a little hard to watch at times. Long but pure fun for the most part.

This is probably the best action film I've seen in a while.

Oh, the sweet irony. What would this world be without the acerbic, poignant, scathing realization irony offers? A less interesting place for sure. Take Ji-woon Kim's new (insert traditional Korean food) western action movie for example. The ill-advised title immediately reveals everything that is wrong with it.

Whereas Sergio Leone's THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE UGLY is a similar sprawling western adventure from which Ji-woon Kim freely borrows, it still has a masterful story behind its quirks and eccentricities that holds it together. Kim's GBW lifts the plot from Leone's movie wholesale yet forgets to mould it into a story worth the celluloid it's printed on. When the loud explosions, quick cutting and dangerous acrobatics stop for a moment, the silence becomes deafening. And while GBU will remain a staggering classic, GBW will be sooner tossed away for the next collage of things blowing up and stuntmen jumping from high places that Hollywood will serve us.

The titular three (broadly sketched as the strong silent type, the coldhearted bastard and the bumbling fool respectively) are all after a map that reveals the ___location of hidden treasure somewhere in Manchuria. Set in early 20th century east Asia, GBW cross-references the genre world of the American western with then contemporary historical setting, something that in theory should resemble the spaghetti western but instead comes off as a tad on the Hollywood side of things.

GBW hovers in the middle, a thinly plotted pastiche that goes on for too long, a step upward from your run-of-the-mill action blockbuster on the strength of exotic locale alone. Mildly interesting at first until you realize it's a one-trick pony. The opening and pre-climax large action scenes are quite good but the middle sags and drags painfully. Easily the most impressive action scene takes place in the desert and involves the Japanese Imperial army, bandits and some more bandits all chasing after a motorbike. The astonishing panoramas of the army bombing the desert that recall Sergei Bondarchuk's epic WATERLOO are a pleasure to be hold.

I see a lot of people praising this film, not for what it is, but for what it's not (a Hollywood blockbuster); however if we're quick to scoff at the sight of another mindless, airheaded superhero blockbuster, if we refuse to be dazzled by dramatically vapid spectacles that make up for their wafer-thin story and absent characterization by staging bigger, louder, and more CGI-laden scenes of things blowing up and buff guys posing for the camera, I don't see any reason why we should take them from South Koreans in the name of 'foreign cinema' - even when they're presented in the form of homage, or perhaps more so in those cases (as Kim shows no understanding of Leone's cinema). I'm sorry to say I ended up disliking this movie as much as I was looking forward to it.

And finally why didn't anybody tell Kim that GBU spoof titles stopped being cool 20 years ago?

My expectations for this film were through the roof. It's basically a Korean all-star game: directed by Ji-woon Kim, he of A Bittersweet Life and A Tale of Two Sisters fame (not to mention The Quiet Family), and starring three of Korea's finest (or at least most popular) actors, Woo-sung Jung, Byung-hun Lee, and (one of my favorite actors, Korean or otherwise) Kang-ho Song.

The production values are top notch, the direction creative and self-assured, the special effects worth the time and money spent on them. I love the kill scenes as directed by Kim, especially one of the first ones where a guy is running from train car to train car, bursting through doors like they don't exist and then BAM! He's five feet behind where he was. You have to see it to appreciate it, I guess. The timing and the focus on the result instead of the impact makes the impact seem more impactful. Whoever edited this film did a great job.

Woo-sung Jung plays the Good, and he's a cute guy who oozes goodness, so that's good. His character is perhaps a bit under-played/under-developed but that's the nature of Good, isn't it? Byung-hun Lee as the Bad has a little bit too much contemporary in his swagger and look. He's more arrogant than Bad, but we're supposed to dislike him so that's good too. Not surprisingly, it's Kang-ho Song, as the Weird, who steals the show. He runs through this movie like a chicken or a turkey with its head cut off but never misses a beat. He's having a good time and makes sure that we do too. He's able to do things that many other actors are incapable of like delivering predictable lines with equal parts sincerity and irony so that we won't even think of groaning out loud. He's so adorably slightly plump and likable that even when ... well, I don't want to give it away ... we like him. We really do.

Caught up in all the fun and excitement I almost forgot that, with very few exceptions, movies with lots of gun fights are stupid.

This movie is fantastic, exhilarating and fun. High dramatic art it is not.

It's a movie about a chase for treasure, and it holds onto that and never forgets. In the pursuit of creating a chase, everything is crafted carefully. The cinematography is breathtaking, with huge elaborate sets that are used to their fullest. Most of the stunts and effects are real, CGI being kept to a minimum. It is an action movie with actual action instead of pixels, a rarity in movies from the past 10 years. Stunning candy for all the senses, it gets your adrenaline pumping! As far as acting goes, it is excellent. Korean comic actor Song Kang-Ho fills the "Weird" role of Tae-Goo, pulling off a combination of humanity and quirkiness. Lee Byung-Hun is the 'bad' character, brutal and insane as gangster Chang-Yi. Filling out the main three is Jung Woo-Son as the cool, collected and more than a little arrogant bounty hunter Do-Won. While Jung is eclipsed by the other two, his character ultimately became my favorite during the climax. The supporting cast is none-too-shabby either, playing everything from military dropouts to ninjas, all well. Particularly entertaining are the leaders of a group of Manchurian gangsters, who watch insanity take place and calmly discuss it from horseback.

Now, while the acting is good...there is not a lot of it. I don't think anyone is going to try to pretend this is a character-driven piece. It could have been, maybe, but it wasn't try to be. It was trying to be fun. There is enough character development so that when the climax rolls around after two madcap hours of amazing action, you care that the characters lives are being threatened. That's...all.

But the action is extremely well done, with a heart-pounding score that makes it all the well fun. For entertainment, you aren't going to get much more well-done for this. Supremely fun, with scenes shot with people, horses, cars and real pyrotechnics in the middle of the Gobi desert (too much CGI and spectacle just becomes yawn-worthy, I often fun). So get the DVD, get some popcorn, turn the sound WAY up and prepare for a beautifully-crafted action movie. Not for a complex character-driven masterpiece.