6 stars

dir: Kim Ji-woon

2010

Jeez, do I need a shot and a shower after that. Make that three shots and two showers to get the taste of death out of my mouth and the stench of this film off my skin.

This is a revenge flick, usually a genre known for being full of sweetness and light, made even uglier and darker by a director committed to making the audience feel as harried, exhausted and sick to the stomach as the main characters.

And good goddamn is it a long film. Even had this flick been 45 minutes shorter it still would have felt like the longest flick since Gone with the Wind crossed with Holocaust epic Shoah.

You wouldn’t know it, but South Korea seems to be, based on this flick, infested with serial killers. They’re everywhere. And, even better, they all know each other. I tell you what, this entire scenario is only even vaguely plausible if South Korea is actually located right next to Ciudad Juarez, in Mexico, because they’re getting away with murder on a daily basis in both locations.

Okay, so the Korean peninsula is nowhere near there, but all the same, these fuckers put Hannibal Lecter, Henry Lee Lucas and Colonel Gaddafi to shame.

A woman, stranded by dint of defective car, is raped and murdered by a deeply horrible man, who then dismembers her and disposes of her earthly remains. Not that the guy would care, seeing as he is a complete psychopath, but the woman’s husband, Soo-hyun (Lee Byung-hun), works for the National Intelligence Service, and is some kind of superspy type. Not only that, but the girl’s father was a police chief. Not only that… I think you get the idea.

Soo-hyun intends to find the vile motherfucker (played by Choi Min-sik, best known for playing the main character in Old Boy) in order to get revenge for his murdered lady love. And he intends to do so, in the old parlance, with extreme prejudice.

The problem is, the flick wants to tell us the audience something that we already know: that in a decent society, regular folks can’t be going around getting their vengeance on, because it’s bad and it never works out properly and people’s feelings get hurt and so on. Even if they’ve got secret spy super skills, even if the scumbags they’re after are irredeemably evil, it doesn’t work out when people take the law into their own hands. The aggrieved become just as monstrous as the murderers and yadda yadda yadda.

dir: Jaume Collet-Serra

2009

This is both a horrifying and silly flick. It would be easy to just say it’s a shit flick with the most ridiculous twist ending since the last time M. Night Shyamalan made one of his ridiculous movies. In fact it wouldn’t just be easy, it’d be downright accurate.

Still, I can’t dismiss it entirely. Approached as a genre piece, it’s unsettling and disturbing, as in, it achieves its ambition of creeping out the viewer, the viewer being me, in this case. This strangely-put together flick fits into that horror-thriller sub-genre about competent sociopaths, this time in the form of a nine-year-old child adopted by a nice family, who do what they do, infuriating the viewer because no-one except the main character can see what’s going on until it’s way too late.

Esther is an odd child adopted from an orphanage because a mother (Vera Farmiga) can’t get over the recent death of the baby she was carrying. This is conveyed to us, the viewers, right at the beginning in a horrific birth scene which is rendered as some kind of demented nightmare. Whilst the details aren’t considered literal, the loss of the child is, and we learn more details about spiralling depression, alcohol abuse and infidelity. All this occurs despite the fact that the two parentals have two other kids, an annoying teenage boy called Daniel, and the sweet, deaf Max.

Into this house they bring this strange girl who not a soul buys as being anything but the demented creature the promo posters depict her as being. Those posters were a stroke of genius, I have to say. The way that image was composed, by splitting and mirroring half of her face and reconnecting them at an odd angle, was far-more off-putting than probably most of the flick.

Ah, that’s probably not entirely true. There are plenty of instances of Esther murdering a whole bunch of people, and meting out violence to children, which of course is horribly disturbing.

dir: David Wain

2008

I really do wonder how some flicks get made. This isn’t a bad flick, but when I think about the performances, the plot and its success, I wonder who thought it was a good idea in the first place.

For a flick without a single likable character in it, it does manage to generate several laughs, at least several more laughs than another recent comedy that inflicted itself upon our eyeballs called Observe and Report. The difference is that this flick is nowhere near as vile, and does have some pretty funny moments. Not many, but enough.

This one, unfortunately, has Seann William Scott in a lead role, and that never helps anybody. As I’ve said in other reviews, I think it’s great that retarded people not be excluded from working in Hollywood, and that Scott continuing to get work gives hope to all the other Downs Syndrome sufferers out there. But good God is he dumb. Even knowing that he’s supposed to be dumb doesn’t change the fact that he consistently gives the impression that he’s only a few seconds away from crapping his own pants.

Paul Rudd is a bit better, but he’s really only playing a minor variation on most of the characters he ever plays. Actually, scratch that, he remains unchanged from movie to movie. The difference is that I actually find him likable even if his characters are obnoxious.

Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) are two shmucks joined by a common work purpose, that being working for one of those loathsome energy drink companies. Their task in life is visiting schools, delivering speeches about how kids should stay off hard illegal drugs and instead get addicted to legal substances like the contents of their energy drink Minotaur. Wheeler, being a moron, loves the fuck out of his job. Danny hates the fact that he’s been stuck in a job he hates for so long, and hates pretty much everything else in the world as well. When his long-suffering lawyer girlfriend starts getting tired of his bullshit, sensing this, he proposes, with apposite results ensuing.

After a nonsensical binge that only makes sense if the contents of energy drinks actually contain half the crap the producers contend, Danny and Wheeler end up in trouble with the law, and are both looking at jail time. Of course, the legal system being what it is, these middle class white guys get screwed, and end up having to do community service in the form of a Big Brother program.