Folks, you need to watch this movie right now. Tonight, or tomorrow at the latest.
I’m serious.
It’s a gem of popular Korean cinema. The film is insanely fun from start to finish. It’s entirely possible that I could watch this movie on repeat for an entire afternoon without getting bored.
As the name suggests, it’s a humorous homage to the western genre, in similar fashion to how Edgar Wright and Simon Pegg treated zombie movies with Shaun of the Dead and action movies with Hot Fuzz. Like those films, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is good enough in its own right to be enjoyed by someone who has never seen a western before (like my wife, who loved the hell out of it), but that enjoyment grows deeper the more familiar you are with the genre. So, for Brian and I, after watching 30 westerns in 30 days, the film was riddled with easter eggs just waiting to be spotted by attentive viewers, namely us.
Yet, while the influence of the western genre was plain for all to see, Ji-woon Kim was masterful in making sure that he tilted every scene he used from classic westerns so that he was always telling his own story. He never just copied a scene or moment, he always shifted it just to the left, making a movie that is an homage to some of his favorite movies, as opposed to making a movie which is merely a collage of other people’s work.
Kim’s directing was fantastic, as was the cinematography. As we were watching, we consistently exclaimed in wonder at the high degree of difficulty of so many of the shots. There were many long, audacious tracking shots filled with so many moving parts that they were literally jaw dropping, some of which were extended helicopter shots that must have been a bitch to reset when something went wrong. There are still some shots, especially those with large explosives next to living people, which I have no idea how they did. That’s impressive in this day and age.
The action scenes were the perfect cocktail of thrilling and hilarious. That’s a tough combo to get right without losing one or the other, but this should be used as a case study in how to get it right… or perfect.
Yet, with all that action and technical wizardry, they didn’t skimp on the characters. The writing was strong and the acting was pitch perfect by all involved. All three of the main characters are on the short list of the most enjoyable characters I’ve seen in my young movie-viewing life.
It was a tall order for the primary actors, each was filling a prototypical role that could have easily bogged them down in convention, or else their performance could have gone so far off the deep end that there is no longer a connection to the archetype. Yet, each character incarnated their role with the right amount of continuity to the past, tempered by a heaping portion of their own swagger and attitude to keep things fresh. The performances were so impeccable, it makes me wonder if the aforementioned swagger and attitude was perhaps Ji-woon Kim’s, bleeding through from the other side of the camera.
So seriously, go watch this movie now!
Pretty soon, I’m going to have to write a post all about the actor who played ‘The Weird,’ Kang-ho Song, whose dominance in the world of remarkable Korean cinema is nothing short of amazing. I believe he is this generation’s Toshirô Mifune, and sadly, like Mifune, most folks outside of their native country (Japan for Mifune and Korea for Song) will live and die without learning their name. Bullshit!
