The first South Korean film to feature on the blog in its short history and I am always saying that I want to watch films from different cultures and that are in a different language. I am also encouraging people to comment either on here, twitter or on the facebook page telling me their favourite films and if I haven't already seen them then I will watch them and review them here so feel free to leave a comment and I will watch it within a week and post the review here.
I found this film disturbing. It is a thriller and I will assume that most people aren't familiar with the plot so briefly I will explain. Oh Dae-Su is a business man and is arrested for being drunk and disorderly. On his way home he is kidnapped and imprisoned for 15 years without knowing why. He spends the years in prison practising shadow boxing and trying to dig his way out (similar to The Count of Monte Cresto) but before he can finally escape he is hypnotised and wakes up in a suit on a roof. He spends most of the film trying to find out who imprisoned him and why and ends up playing a game with his captor. His captor eventually kills himself and the film is left on a slight cliffhanger.
This film contains unnecessary violence, incest and way too long sex scenes and it is entirely motivated around revenge. Watching the fight scenes was no way near as impressive as some other martial arts films that are out there and were out there before this film was released. It won awards but I am struggling to understand why. No one in it was particularly outstanding. I didn't enjoy the plot or anything particularly about this film but I didn't hate it. It is a thriller and it works well as a thriller with you spending a lot of your time trying to work out why these things are happening to him but with him breaking out of prison so early it made the film feel longer than it actually was. Coming in at under 2 hours is short in the world of film now but within about thirty mins of the film he was out of prison and trying to track down the prison that he was in. Once he does that he has to fight everyone in the prison to get out again and at a time like that you would expect the music to change but there was nothing to really suggest that action was taking place and that he was going to leave the building with something sticking out of his back.
Only when they were screaming did they show a change in emotion. In the remake they show a lot more emotion and really play on the general confusion of the main character which made the film a lot more interesting. Maybe just because this film is so weird I didn't find it interesting and I struggled to keep myself watching it. Nothing about this film really screamed thriller at me, not the music, not the way in which it was filmed. It settled for something in between Memento and a Hitchcock movie. Hitchcock is dependent on the music and Memento has the confusion shown in the sometimes disjointed and blury filming and this film had neither but appeared to be trying to have both. Yes, there is a different style of filming in different cultures but this film seemed to be a little lost as to what style it was going for.
If anyone wants to comment on this and help me out with it then please feel free to do so but for now it gets a solid 5 out of 10 from me.
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