The Chaser aka Chugyeogja (2008) Review

What first turned me on to Korean film was the seemingly complete disinterest in Hollywood tropes. What I didn't know at the time was that prior to the mid 90s Korean cinemas showed almost exclusively Hollywood films. After nearly a decade of little to no domestic film success, Korean directors decided to reinvent their national cinema, passing over the glitz and gloss of Western films in favor of the grit and realism of the art-house film. And it worked; Korean-made films began to retake the domestic box office around the year 2000. However, around 2006, at the height of this New Korean Cinema, the revolutionary nature of the industry inexplicably halted. Korean directors began to settle back into safe content, and financiers played it safe with the blockbuster gangster genre or the sappy romance/sex comedy genre.

Amidst all this, The Chaser is a breath of fresh air, and maybe the best Korean film I’ve seen in the past couple of years. But considering the current state of Korean cinema, that doesn’t necessarily make it a resounding success. Just a step in the right direction.

Business is bad for ex-detective turned pimp Joong-ho: his girls keep getting sent out and not returning. Recognizing a pattern in which particular phone number calls the girls before their disappearance, he asks one of his best girls, Mi-jin, to go to the man’s house and text Joong-ho with the address so he can come over and confront the man for stealing his prostitutes. But the man she encounters isn’t a rival pimp, he’s a serial killer named Young-min who traps Mi-jin before she can text her location and graphically attempts to kill her with a hammer.

If this sounds exciting to you, fine. Go see the film already, you’re hooked. But The Chaser is not content to be a routine action film; it is at this point that the film takes a step in a new direction. While disposing of a victim’s car, Young-min gets into an accident with none other than Joong-Ho. Noticing blood on Young-min’s shirt, Joong-Ho chases him down and the two wind up at the police station. Strangely, Young-min doesn’t deny his crimes; he confesses quickly to 12 murders. But he won't say where the bodies are. So while the police fruitlessly question Young-min, Joong-Ho tries to find Mi-jin on his own before the police are forced to set Young-min free for lack of evidence.

It’s an interesting reversal of the genre to have the killer found, but the crime scene hidden, and I don’t feel that it's the only trick up the film’s sleeve. Reversal or no, I found The Chaser often exciting and suspenseful, and at times even affecting. Watching Joong-Ho slowly change from a caricature of a disgruntled pimp, hot-headed and insensitive, into a caring man when forced to care for Mi-jin’s daughter brought his character full circle, and made his efforts to find Mi-jin all the more emotionally felt.

The odd flash of inspired camerawork by first time director Hong-jin Na shows promise, and his decision to play the violence completely straight is more than welcome. Muting the soundtrack to emphasize grunts and the sound of objects on skin and bone made even this old bloodhound cringe a few times. Much less welcome were stray moments of extreme artificiality, particularly the steadfast Korean archetype of portraying the police department as absolutely incompetent, and a few rogue actors who showed the director’s lack of precision.

In the Western press, The Chaser has often been likened to Sympathy for Mr Vengeance and Memories of Murder, two of the most unanimously praised Korean films of the past five years. Perhaps its unfair to lump The Chaser in with such films; it’s not nearly as well-rounded or thought-provoking, but it is a satisfying and engaging thriller. I’m not terribly surprised to find that there is talk of an American remake with scribe William Monahan, who rewrote China’s Infernal Affairs into Oscar-winner The Departed, at the helm. It’s possible The Chaser is getting a bit of a free pass because the industry has been so stagnant, but minor quibbles aside it is a good film. And it’s really nice to have a good new Korean film. It’s been a while.

The Happening (2008) Review

Watching The Happening brought me back to an experience I remember well from my childhood. Walking into a local video joint, feverish with the excitement of cinematic possibility, and rushing from aisle to aisle, I often would come across something promising and new from a star I was familiar with. Perhaps the cover displayed Jackie Chan or even Steven Seagal; I’m a product of the 80s, after all. I would grab up these straight-to-video films and rush home expecting an Under Siege or a Rumble in the Bronx. Instead I was treated to bad acting, amateur direction and bland dialogue. I had been duped. Certainly these sorts of half-assed cash-ins haven’t disappeared, I’ve just gotten better at avoiding them. But The Happening made it to theaters.

Speaking from a wealth of experience, The Happening is the equivalent of a straight-to-video horror film, ushered to the big screen by a director who could apparently sell a bear the pelt off its back. It’s a baffling picture, and not in the respect it doesn’t make any sense, it’s that I don’t understand how it exists among the scores of respectable films now in theatres.

In New York’s Central Park people suddenly start behaving strangely. They stop what they’re doing and begin to hurt themselves to the point of death. We see construction workers leap off buildings, policemen shoot themselves in the head, and a woman stab herself in the neck with a hairpin. This bizarre behavior is spreading all over the East Coast, and, fearing some sort of terrorist attack, we follow high school science teacher Elliot (Mark Wahlberg,) his wife (Zooey Deschanel) and his friend (John Leguizamo) as they attempt to flee the rapidly spreading “attack.”

Now as a fan of horror, and I have no particular problem with the preposterous nature of the movie. The idea of involuntary suicide is a terrifying enough hook, and a few early sequences are well realized in that respect, even if they are strictly genre fare. But the emptiness with which everyone reacts to the phenomenon, and the subsequent lack of suspense that it brings, leaves the film floundering as we move from location to location outrunning an unseen threat. I considered the possibility that M. Night was trying to say something about our reactions to a terrifying unexplainable attack, but judging by the absurd dialogue, I’d never say these people were meant to be mistaken for realistic.

The dialogue is the top culprit here. M. Night often strives to be eerie and foreboding with wooden speeches and obtuse metaphors, but his cleverness comes off as condescending to any audience member who’s seen a horror film or two. Particularly as we approach the final act, and the entrance of an eccentric recluse who offers to take the protagonists in, the dialogue threatens to careen the picture headfirst into self-parody.

As for as the acting, it's more like overacting. Speaking as someone who tends to respect the work of Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel, their performances here are career lows. I can’t understand how they came to such terribly zombified performances, as they usually rise above the weaknesses of their lesser pictures, (see - The Big Hit or Hitchhikers Guide).

I feel I should stop at this point; the film isn’t going to get any better for all my whinging, and you certainly get the point that I thought it was terrible.This is the first Shyamalan movie I’ve seen since The Sixth Sense way back in 1999. I’ve managed to avoid his films based on word-of-mouth alone. But the premise and the promise of an exciting genre film fooled me. “M. Night’s first R-rated film!” wasn’t overly bloody by genre standards, and I don’t recall any cursing or sex, so I wonder how much of that campaign was to attract the ever expanding hard-horror audience into the theatre. Like those films in the video store of my childhood, this one had nice packaging but no filling.

A side note: while watching The Happening I was sure I was seeing the worst movie of the year. Then I saw The Love Guru. So I’d like to lessen my distaste for The Happening by about 10% accordingly.

Hancock (2008) Review

More and more I’ve found myself drawn into the spectacle of the big budget summer film. Sometimes the promise of big budget hi-jinks is too much even for this fanatic of the obscure. And after all the bad reviews I’ve heard and read, I want to step up and say, Hancock is not the dud it has been maligned to be.

Surely, I don’t have to tell you much about the plot. You know the story pretty well if you’ve been near a television in the past 3 months, so I’ll be brief. Will Smith plays Hancock, a superhero who has issues. He drinks too much, he’s reckless in his exploits, often causing millions of dollars worth of damage, and worst of all, he doesn’t care if people like him. Or does he? After saving good-natured PR man Ray (Jason Bateman) from a train, (at the expense of the train,) Ray offers to do a little PR for Hancock. You see, Hancock actually does care what people think of him, he just doesn’t know how to show it. So at Ray’s suggestion, Hancock offers himself up to the Los Angeles prison in a gesture meant to atone for the damage he’s caused the city over the years. Their hope is that when crime goes up without him, the people of LA will clamor for his return.

The first half of Hancock is breezy and fun. It plays almost as a send up of the superhero movies we’ve been beaten over the head with over the past few years or so, and it’s a breath of fresh air. Bateman and Smith are well cast: Smith is less goofy than you would expect after watching countless reruns of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air or even Men in Black. He plays Hancock as a man detached and cold, and while it’s a similar performance to last year’s I Am Legend, the choice helps create a certain amount of subtle empathy with the character. He makes snarky comments, and they are played for humor, but Smith’s dedication to the character never waivers. As usual, Bateman is the perfect straight man to Smith’s - er - straight man, making jokes so casually it makes you wonder if he’s acting at all. However, Charlize Theron seems a bit lost as Ray’s wife and an even worse mistake was getting Peter Berg to direct.

Berg’s style of verite filming, a mix of zoom-lens and shaky-cam, while perfectly suited to something like Friday Night Lights or The Kingdom, is more of a distraction here than a success. I can see what he’s trying to do: the juxtaposition of verisimilitude with off-the-wall superhero CG destruction sounds interesting enough, but the bombast and silliness of the first half makes it feel cheap. However, the style is much more suited to the second half.

The start of the second half of the film is announced by what everyone wants to talk about: the “twist.” Much has been said about the twist, but I can’t honestly say that the twist is all bad. It just seems to be in the wrong film. In trying to mash in a whole bunch of different plot points, the film forgets about cohesion and character development, which I always thought of as some of Berg’s biggest successes. At a slim 90 minutes, Hancock doesn’t afford itself the time for quick changes of pace and direction without taking the time to earn it, and what should have been an interesting plot point becomes shallow and off-putting.

The original script for Hancock was written over ten years ago, and Berg was quoted as likening it to “a scathing character study of (a) suicidal alcoholic superhero.” While he was impressed with that approach, it was his decision to lighten up the picture in the hope of broadening the audience. Whether or not it was a good idea, it was a decision that wasn’t fully committed to, and that hurt the overall tone of the film. It’s not as if juggling different genres and emotions is impossible or a bad idea. I’ve often lauded Save the Green Planet for being able to juggle horror and comedy seamlessly, but the mix of slapstick and drama here is a bit jarring. Hancock would have been a better film had he stuck to one idea or the other: summer comedy or heavy character drama. Still, like Berg’s other little failure Very Bad Things, it does more right than wrong and my $10.50 was well spent.