The Good the Bad the Weird (***1/2)

I don’t think I’d seen a Korean movie until maybe ten years ago, but now I try not to miss the ones that manage to get theatrical releases. That was also pretty much none until recently, but in the last few years a spate of good to very good movies have made their way to American shores. Although some of these have been arty fare such as the lovely Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring, most are of the type that would be enjoyed by exactly the sort of audience that would never think of seeing a subtitled movie. And although not a few of these were action films (e.g., Old Boy) one thing I hadn’t seen was a western.

As the title, a spoof of Sergio Leone’s “spaghetti western” The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, suggests, it’s a comic variation on the genre. A noodle western was the term applied to the Japanese movie Tampopo, and so this has been called a kimchi western. Yet that doesn’t mean it skimps on the action, at all. The opening sequence, in which not one, or two, but three bandits independently attack the same train, would be the envy of most Hollywood directors. (Director Ji-woon Kim is best known for the psychological horror film A Tale of Two Sisters.) This sequence sets up the rest of the movie, in which a lot of things happen, but which can be pretty much summed up as the different bandits all trying to possess a treasure map or, failing that, the treasure, though no one seems to know what it is. The map is a classic MacGuffin, a plot device whose main purpose is to propel the action—and the comedy.

The three bandits include the Johnny Depp-like Byung-hun Lee (G.I. Joe: The Rise of the Cobra) as the baddest, and Kang-ho Song (The Host) as the weirdest, a likable bumbler who’s sort of tbe hero. A novel element is that the film is set in 1930s Manchuria, an area of China then occupied by Japan. Imperialism becomes a subtext to some of the story, though it’s mostly played for laughs. There’s a hilarious sequence with what seems like the entire Japanese Imperial Army chasing down, or being chased by, one of the bandits. If you don’t mind some scattered gruesomeness, this is altogether entertaining.

IMDB link

viewed April 11 at Prince [Philadelphia Film Festival Spring Preview] and reviewed 5/9/10