I SAW THE DEVIL- Review

I Saw The Devil is about as far away as you can get from the blanket coverage of the royal wedding farrago earlier today, as you'll know if you got the chance to take a trip to the cinema to see it, instead of watching the Disney-esque romantic gubbins. Due to its uber-violent content, it's had a limited release today ahead of a DVD release next Monday.

In the vein of other revenge thrillers, a popular genre in Korea, we find a man who loses a loved one to a vicious murderer. Soo-hyeon is a secret agent whose pregnant fiancee is killed by the sadistic Kyung-chul. Taking two weeks' leave from work, he decides to track down Kyung-chul himself, but rather than taking vengeance forthwith, he begins an increasingly savage game of catch and release.

I don't know that I Saw The Devil is the goriest film ever made, as some have called it, but it's understandable that 144 minutes of what must certainly be the goriest film of 2011 seems like a bigger deal. For 144 minutes, it's surprisingly fast-paced and zippy. The difficulty for some will be that it's also rather stabby, hammer-y and choppy as well. The blood pours, flows, drizzles, squirts, gushes in a way that obscures many potentially more violent films from memory.

The two nemeses in the film are played by Byung-hun Lee and Min-sik Choi, the latter of whom was the hero (sort of) in Oldboy. Here, Choi is despicable and exasperated by equal turns as a sociopathic serial killer who frequently grumbles about how everybody is crazy except him. This while perpetrating hideous violence against women and repeatedly falling into the traps of his increasingly demented pursuer. After a while, he becomes almost like Wile E. Coyote, or Tom, or Scratchy, or another abused cartoon animal of your choice.

It's effectively a black comedy, though obviously splattered sporadically with red. The difficulty is that every now and then, the supporting characters, who are as satellites in this gory game of cat-and-mouse, will stop the action dead to refer to Nietzsche. The "He Who Fights Monsters" trope is easy to swallow just as long as characters don't stand around and talk about it. The character of Soo-hyeon is also another of those revenge movie protagonists with little personality to get us behind him.

Of course, after the opening scene, in which his fiancee meets her untimely and painful end, we want Hyung-chul to get his comeuppance. It's just hard to care about Soo-hyeon because he's nothing so complex as the film's Nietzschean musings. So often these films forget to install a personality. Motivation goes some of the way, but without personality, it does amount to 144 minutes of hard violence, sometimes from a deranged killer who we definitely don't like, and also from a protagonist we're meant to like but who, like Zaphod Beeblebrox, is actually "just this guy, you know?"

I Saw The Devil is certainly a tough watch, less because of the punishing amounts of gore and violence, or even because of the running time, and more because it's heavy-handed and there is less to it than you would think. Its moral compass is in perfect working order, it's artfully constructed and always shocking, but there's not as much to it as I would have expected. If you even have to ask after reading all of this if you're going to like it or not, then it's probably not for you.

I Saw The Devil is now showing in limited release nationwide, and will be released on DVD and Blu-ray on May 9th.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen I Saw The Devil, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

BEASTLY- Review

So soon after Red Riding Hood, I find myself delving back into the Twilight zone for another teen-oriented, romantically updated fairytale. On paper, Beastly reads like a TV movie version of the story of Beauty and the Beast. Alex Pettyfer is the Beast, Vanessa Hudgens is the Beauty, and Neil Patrick Harris and Lisa Gay Hamilton round out the cast as the candlestick and the clock.

The Beast in this case is Kyle Kingson, an infuriatingly obnoxious little scrote who's supposed to have gotten the position of Green Party President at high school by sheer attractiveness. This provokes the wrath of conveniently placed Goth-y witch-type Kendra, and she curses Kyle with a spell that uglies him up. If he can't break the spell in a year, he'll look that way forever, and his only hope is the love of troubled teen Lindy.

On balance, it's not quite as shallow as it sounds. Except for the character of Kyle, who is exactly as shallow as he sounds, making him very difficult to root for him. Don't forget that Alex Pettyfer, lately of sci-fi Twilight surrogate I Am Number Four, is not the best of actors. The idea he could get elected to any role through his charisma is laughable, cos there's really none of it to be had. Wisely, the film soon buries him under some ugly make-up, which almost serves as a prosthesis for him to act properly.

Pettyfer isn't the only one who struggles, mind. You see Neil Patrick Harris floundering here as the comic relief, despite the fact there's nothing wrong with his delivery- just the dialogue he's given. The script, written by director Daniel Barnz, is pretty puny. There's no new ground to be broken by another film in the Twilight mold, and despite how recently Stephanie Meyer's books came around, it feels like we've had hundreds of them already. The weird thing is how much the film has to stretch itself to update the fairytale to a modern high school setting. Even Red Riding Hood had similar problems in a period setting, and arguably, Beastly has more work to do.

Those familiar with the story, through Disney or wherever, know that the cursed Beast was once a handsome and wealthy guy who still lives in a big castle, now transformed into a self-imposed prison. Belle, the titular Beauty, has to stay in said castle with him, and the reason why differs between adaptations. For Beastly, the castle is a penthouse apartment, and the reason for Lindy's house arrest there comes down to a contrived and ill-explained sub-plot involving her father and some criminals.

This eventually works itself into a substantial plothole, but one that you're not supposed to look too deeply into because it's just a fluffy teen romance. I'm all for films that appeal to an under-served demographic, but this one still feels slack, and somehow rushed. That's especially weird because of how the film was pushed back from last summer to avoid clashing with Zac Efron's Charlie St. Cloud. You know what though, it was still more enjoyable than Twilight.

Yeah, there are more unintentional laughs in Twilight, but there are also a metric fuckton of things that are wrong with the story and characters, particularly the character of baked potato-brained reader surrogate Bella Swan. Aside from a general sense of moneyed superficiality about Kyle that lasts all the way through his learning curve, there's little in this film that could either piss me off or send a bad message to the target audience. And it didn't leave me totally indifferent either- I doubt I'll remember it come the end of the year, but it's pretty harmless and pacifying. It could have gone darker and been a better film, but then it would cease to serve its purpose.

I can't deny that I expected Beastly to be one of those self-reviewing films where the title says it all. Instead, I was surprised to find Vanessa Hudgens taking that role when she first sees the fugly version of our leading titamaboob and lovingly proclaims "I've seen worse". The script isn't up to much, as you can see, but I appreciate that it's certainly more comfortable in itself than its main competitor at the moment, Red Riding Hood. Although I can only declare that I personally didn't enjoy the film much, I can still see it going over pretty well with the target audience.

Beastly is released in cinemas nationwide tomorrow.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen Beastly, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.

FASTER- Review

The tagline for Faster goes a little like this- "Justice is swift. Vengeance is faster." If anything, that serves to remind me of the episode of The Simpsons where Homer changes his name and duly informs his kids that there are three ways to do things- the right way, the wrong way, and the Max Power way", the latter being the same as the wrong way, "but faster."

The plot itself does little to dispel any expectations you might have going in. Dwayne Johnson plays Driver, a man who gets out of prison for good behaviour and promptly goes on a killing spree. Driver wants revenge on the men who ambushed and murdered his brother's gang a decade earlier, and he'll stop at nothing, not even the best efforts of the cop or the contract killer who have each separately been tasked with stopping him.

Everything about it seems to scream that it's a big, loud and audacious action film along the lines of Drive Angry, from the title, and the casting of Johnson, to the naming of all the characters for their most obvious trait, like Driver, or Cop, or Killer, or Evangelist, or Woman. No, really- a woman in this film is credited as Woman, despite actually having a name in the context of the story.

Those who are given names have names like Baphomet or Detective Cicero- to wit, names that carry heavy symbolic significance. If the naming of the characters seems blunt, you've got a decent idea of the blunt force trauma that Faster is all about. What's surprising is that the impact isn't always the result of a cheap shock or an audacious fight scene, but also from what seems to be an attempt at proper character development.

If Driver isn't carrying a gun, his hands are occupied wringing over the various moral and ethical implications of his rampage. It's a film that's more self-conscious than self-aware, and the internal discussion of Driver's actions falls apart with the general sort of hypocrisy that winds up being a staple of any full-blooded revenge film. Violence is bad, but some bad violence is good if you do the good violence to bad people. And "vengeance is faster" apparently.

You can argue that family fare, like The Tooth Fairy and Race to Witch Mountain, has been holding Dwayne Johnson back from becoming the big action hero that he's clearly capable of being. Coming back around to action in both this and the upcoming Fifth Fast and the Furious Film For Which I Don't Know The Fucking Title, Johnson isn't exactly challenged. There's more time for tearful contemplation that there has been in any of his other films, but it carries no weight when we're so separate from Driver.

The rest of the cast is generally rather good, with Billy Bob Thornton's tortured and drug-addled Cop making a nice counter-point to Carla Gugino as his frustrated colleague, and Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje showing up at a pivotal point in the film to give Johnson a final obstacle. The major bum note is the casting of Oliver Jackson-Cohen as Killer, a role that Clive Owen might have got if he were shit. The character is precocious, and the acting is not much better.

You can't particularly measure Faster by what it has given the world in terms of moral debate and scrutiny of revenge movie archetypes. However, there's still a hell of a lot of value in a film this blunt that still bothers to think about this kind of thing, even if its ponderings don't quite reach a satisfying conclusion. For a film called Faster, it's remarkably pedestrian stuff, but it has at least one good plot twist to its name and it's more consistently engaging than the usual assaults upon cinema.

Faster is now showing in cinemas nationwide.
------------------------------------------------------------------
If you've seen Faster, why not share your comments below?

I'm Mark the mad prophet, and until next time, don't watch anything I wouldn't watch.