Once upon a time in Manchuria
A review requested by Kevin, with thanks to supporting Alternate Ending as a donor through Patreon.
An older review of this film can be found here.
It's clear right from the title of 2008's The Good, the Bad, the Weird (which I believe to be a direct translation from the Korean) that the film intends to be some manner of a riff on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the 1966 Italian-Spanish Western directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood that I think you could defensibly claim is the single best-known and most widely-scene and even possibly the most highly-regarded Western film amongst people alive in the 21st Century. And that already starts to give away the game a little bit, I think; GB Weird is in part referencing GB Ugly not because director/co-writer Kim Jee-woon has some unique affection for that Leone film or because there was something specific he could develop out of that movie, but because it is maybe the genre-defining work, the most internationally prominent example of a Western. And Westerns are, in an odd way, maybe the most internationally prominent genre: through some weird quirk of history that I could speculate on at length (short version: because they can be made for very little money and audiences tend to like them), Westerns are as close to a universal genre across all of the film-producing nations as you are likely to find. They are not always, of course, technically "Western" in the sense of being set in some relative West; African and South American Westerns tend to be Southerns, in my experience, while in Russia and the rest of the former Communist Bloc in Europe, they're Easterns. But whichever direction they're facing, they all tend to draw on the same storytelling tropes and even some of the same iconography as the American Western: rugged, violent men driven by their own (possibly broken) code of honor on the frontier between "civilization" and "the wild", with more or less irony packed into those words, especially "civilization", depending on the mood of the filmmakers.
The point being: basically everywhere has Westerns. They are arguably the movie-est genre. And The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is therefore, transitively speaking, arguably the movie-iest movie. And that, I think, is why Kim wanted to do his little dance with it, because he wanted to make a movie about "movie-ness": a movie that amplified and exaggerated the flashy, spectacular gee-whiz experience of just wanting to let a movie knock you on your ass a few good times as it pulled out dazzling image upon dazzling image, and massive, simplistic emotion after emotion. The Good, the Bad, the Weird is many things, but first and above all it is this - an overwhelming, overstimulating, exhausting and boundlessly imaginative celebration of how cool it is to watch movies.
And that is not, for the record, where I planned to go with that: what I was going to say (and it all is sort of different ways of saying the same thing) is that while you can tell just from seeing the title that The Good, the Bad, the Weird is playing around with the idea of the Leone film, and you can tell that as well from comparing the two films' functionally identical loglines, it's nevertheless kind of miraculous and special that while actually watching The Good, the Bad, the Weird, it never even slightly feels like a remake or a copy or whatever. Despite being made predominately from recycled parts - and doing everything in its power to make sure we see where they were recycled from - this feels completely fresh and original, a bottomless well of creativity and joyful inspiration. I think one thing that's unambiguously clear from the evidence of his filmography is that Kim loves cinema; nobody would jump from genre to genre as relentlessly as he has (he has, as of 2023, completed ten features, and the closest thing that any of them come to repeating himself is that two are horror movies broadly about "family dynamics") if they didn't love all the genres, and the medium keeping them all under one giant tent. Indeed, for all that this movie loves Westerns, it's freely borrowing from Hong Kong martial arts films and the iconography of wuxia just as relentlessly and just as joyously. Even within Kim's evident, tangible cinephilia, this feels like the movie where he is most invested in the fun of movies, both as a maker and as a viewer.
That being said, the setting of the film is, in theory, not very fun at all: it mostly takes place in the Manchurian desert in 1939, a fraught place at a fraught point in time when the Imperial Japanese Army was waging war in China to consolidate its control over large parts of the East Asian mainland, the first phase of what would eventually blossom into World War II. The Good, the Bad, the Weird doesn't take any specific stance on that conflict, any more than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had particular thoughts about the U.S. Civil War; that being said, there's a big difference between "this happened about a century ago" and "this happened during the lifetime of people still living", much as there's a difference between "why would an Italian filmmaker have any particular feelings about something that happened between Americans" and "a Korean filmmaker probably has some extremely strong feelings about Imperial Japan, and maybe just the Japanese in general". So even as I don't think Kim is interested in making claims about that particular war, there's a particular bleakness that comes attached to the setting, one that adds a sharp note of cynicism to the movie, as it contrasts its zippy cinematic creativity with the brutality of a world consumed in war so much that you don't really get a strong feeling of what it would be like for there not to be war going on. And that's pretty much in keeping with the one true constant in the director's filmography, which is a strong tendency towards very dark humor. As far as that goes, I do think The Good, the Bad, The Weird is probably his least-dark film, but it's indulging in the same irony as the Leone film, that even the "heroes" in a setting like this are awful people who will probably die horribly.
So, Manchuria, 1939: here we find the relatively Good man Park Do-won (Jung Woo-sung), a bounty hunter on the hunt for a very Bad hitman named Park Chang-yi (Lee Byung-hun), who has lately executed a scheme to steal a map from the Japanese, traveling across the desert on a train. Now, having executed the scheme doesn't mean that Chang-yi actually has the map; it was snatched up first by a man who is decisively and unmistakably The Weird, Yoon Tae-goo (Song Kang-ho). There are a lot of details that flesh out this scenario, enough for it to be pretty easy to get pretty lost in all of the criss-crossing tensions between characters - aside from the three leads, the Japanese army and a group of Manchurian bandits are also trying to get the map - and the general superfluity of stuff that Kim is shoving into his movie. But it's basically just the broad story of the Leone film: the three stumble their way through a war-torn landscape until they end up in a three-way standoff at the point marked on the treasure chest. The heart of that story isn't in that re-used story, but in the energy swirling around it, the sense of play in staging action sequences that are as much ballet numbers or slapstick comedy routines as they are genre film setpieces.
Mostly, what becomes clear quite early is that Kim is shifting the film's tone firmly in the direction of Weird, with Tae-goo functioning as the film's de facto protagonist; even the way that Lee and Jung have been dressed and made-up to look similar to each other speaks to how much the film wants to weight our response towards Song's very singular movie star presence (this was well before he was all the way famous outside of Korea, and I wouldn't be at all qualified to say how famous he was inside Korea), a combination of cuddly stuffed toy and absurd fool and unpredictable maniac. It's an excellent combination of performer and role: Tae-goo is basically the Daffy Duck in this scenario, destabilising things not from venality and animal viciousness, like Tuco the Ugly was the old movie, but because he keeps doing bizarre and stupid things - weird things, I mean, it's right there in the title. This is the kind of film which sees fit to puncture its own seriousness by placing Song into a diving helmet during an action scene, for little obvious reason beyond that being an amusing thing to do in the middle of a war movie.
The focus on the Weirdness is partially just about making sure we feel the film as a comedy rather than a Leonesque snarl, I suspect, because large parts of The Good, the Bad, the Weird aren't necessarily "silly"; they're just damn fun. Most vividly, Kim and his cinematographers, Lee Mo-gae and Oh Seung-chul, have seen fit to overload the film with swift, energetic camera movements, the most dazzling of which come right at the start, where they can make the most impression. The filmmaking is unabashedly showing off in that opening sequence, racing the camera and down the inside and outside of a train - and what more openly declares "I take enormous joy in movies" as much as a big, flashy train sequence? - and refusing to slow down or settle into a static composition even a tiny bit. It feels like we have to race just to keep up with the film's visuals, and God help you if you're trying to track the story as well. This isn't sustained and probably shouldn't be sustained, though it's tough not to feel that the movie has a saggy midsection, between the unrelenting flair of the opening act and the onslaught of busy action in the final act. It's where the film settles down to tell us more about the characters and how they're slotting into their generically-determined roles to cope with this mad, anarchic world, and in principle that works; in practice, this isn't a film that benefits from Kim's habit of letting character work rise above genre elements, though I appreciate that he doesn't want to just rely on archetypes when he can complicate them. Still, it leads to the film having a somewhat unclear focus, and a film with this many moving parts needs clarity.
Regardless of whether it slows down too much relative to its highest speeds, The Good, the Bad, the Weird is an extremely kinetic, wild thing, and only in this context is any of it plausibly "too slow". The movie's primary mode is delightful mania, a well-choreographed frenzy of everything that could reasonably go into a 1930s war movie and some things that can't, just because it's fun to watch the mash-up speed by. Above all things, this is desperate to avoid boring its audience, or to leave us standing still for long enough that we could even imagine being bored.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
An older review of this film can be found here.
It's clear right from the title of 2008's The Good, the Bad, the Weird (which I believe to be a direct translation from the Korean) that the film intends to be some manner of a riff on The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, the 1966 Italian-Spanish Western directed by Sergio Leone and starring Clint Eastwood that I think you could defensibly claim is the single best-known and most widely-scene and even possibly the most highly-regarded Western film amongst people alive in the 21st Century. And that already starts to give away the game a little bit, I think; GB Weird is in part referencing GB Ugly not because director/co-writer Kim Jee-woon has some unique affection for that Leone film or because there was something specific he could develop out of that movie, but because it is maybe the genre-defining work, the most internationally prominent example of a Western. And Westerns are, in an odd way, maybe the most internationally prominent genre: through some weird quirk of history that I could speculate on at length (short version: because they can be made for very little money and audiences tend to like them), Westerns are as close to a universal genre across all of the film-producing nations as you are likely to find. They are not always, of course, technically "Western" in the sense of being set in some relative West; African and South American Westerns tend to be Southerns, in my experience, while in Russia and the rest of the former Communist Bloc in Europe, they're Easterns. But whichever direction they're facing, they all tend to draw on the same storytelling tropes and even some of the same iconography as the American Western: rugged, violent men driven by their own (possibly broken) code of honor on the frontier between "civilization" and "the wild", with more or less irony packed into those words, especially "civilization", depending on the mood of the filmmakers.
The point being: basically everywhere has Westerns. They are arguably the movie-est genre. And The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is therefore, transitively speaking, arguably the movie-iest movie. And that, I think, is why Kim wanted to do his little dance with it, because he wanted to make a movie about "movie-ness": a movie that amplified and exaggerated the flashy, spectacular gee-whiz experience of just wanting to let a movie knock you on your ass a few good times as it pulled out dazzling image upon dazzling image, and massive, simplistic emotion after emotion. The Good, the Bad, the Weird is many things, but first and above all it is this - an overwhelming, overstimulating, exhausting and boundlessly imaginative celebration of how cool it is to watch movies.
And that is not, for the record, where I planned to go with that: what I was going to say (and it all is sort of different ways of saying the same thing) is that while you can tell just from seeing the title that The Good, the Bad, the Weird is playing around with the idea of the Leone film, and you can tell that as well from comparing the two films' functionally identical loglines, it's nevertheless kind of miraculous and special that while actually watching The Good, the Bad, the Weird, it never even slightly feels like a remake or a copy or whatever. Despite being made predominately from recycled parts - and doing everything in its power to make sure we see where they were recycled from - this feels completely fresh and original, a bottomless well of creativity and joyful inspiration. I think one thing that's unambiguously clear from the evidence of his filmography is that Kim loves cinema; nobody would jump from genre to genre as relentlessly as he has (he has, as of 2023, completed ten features, and the closest thing that any of them come to repeating himself is that two are horror movies broadly about "family dynamics") if they didn't love all the genres, and the medium keeping them all under one giant tent. Indeed, for all that this movie loves Westerns, it's freely borrowing from Hong Kong martial arts films and the iconography of wuxia just as relentlessly and just as joyously. Even within Kim's evident, tangible cinephilia, this feels like the movie where he is most invested in the fun of movies, both as a maker and as a viewer.
That being said, the setting of the film is, in theory, not very fun at all: it mostly takes place in the Manchurian desert in 1939, a fraught place at a fraught point in time when the Imperial Japanese Army was waging war in China to consolidate its control over large parts of the East Asian mainland, the first phase of what would eventually blossom into World War II. The Good, the Bad, the Weird doesn't take any specific stance on that conflict, any more than The Good, the Bad and the Ugly had particular thoughts about the U.S. Civil War; that being said, there's a big difference between "this happened about a century ago" and "this happened during the lifetime of people still living", much as there's a difference between "why would an Italian filmmaker have any particular feelings about something that happened between Americans" and "a Korean filmmaker probably has some extremely strong feelings about Imperial Japan, and maybe just the Japanese in general". So even as I don't think Kim is interested in making claims about that particular war, there's a particular bleakness that comes attached to the setting, one that adds a sharp note of cynicism to the movie, as it contrasts its zippy cinematic creativity with the brutality of a world consumed in war so much that you don't really get a strong feeling of what it would be like for there not to be war going on. And that's pretty much in keeping with the one true constant in the director's filmography, which is a strong tendency towards very dark humor. As far as that goes, I do think The Good, the Bad, The Weird is probably his least-dark film, but it's indulging in the same irony as the Leone film, that even the "heroes" in a setting like this are awful people who will probably die horribly.
So, Manchuria, 1939: here we find the relatively Good man Park Do-won (Jung Woo-sung), a bounty hunter on the hunt for a very Bad hitman named Park Chang-yi (Lee Byung-hun), who has lately executed a scheme to steal a map from the Japanese, traveling across the desert on a train. Now, having executed the scheme doesn't mean that Chang-yi actually has the map; it was snatched up first by a man who is decisively and unmistakably The Weird, Yoon Tae-goo (Song Kang-ho). There are a lot of details that flesh out this scenario, enough for it to be pretty easy to get pretty lost in all of the criss-crossing tensions between characters - aside from the three leads, the Japanese army and a group of Manchurian bandits are also trying to get the map - and the general superfluity of stuff that Kim is shoving into his movie. But it's basically just the broad story of the Leone film: the three stumble their way through a war-torn landscape until they end up in a three-way standoff at the point marked on the treasure chest. The heart of that story isn't in that re-used story, but in the energy swirling around it, the sense of play in staging action sequences that are as much ballet numbers or slapstick comedy routines as they are genre film setpieces.
Mostly, what becomes clear quite early is that Kim is shifting the film's tone firmly in the direction of Weird, with Tae-goo functioning as the film's de facto protagonist; even the way that Lee and Jung have been dressed and made-up to look similar to each other speaks to how much the film wants to weight our response towards Song's very singular movie star presence (this was well before he was all the way famous outside of Korea, and I wouldn't be at all qualified to say how famous he was inside Korea), a combination of cuddly stuffed toy and absurd fool and unpredictable maniac. It's an excellent combination of performer and role: Tae-goo is basically the Daffy Duck in this scenario, destabilising things not from venality and animal viciousness, like Tuco the Ugly was the old movie, but because he keeps doing bizarre and stupid things - weird things, I mean, it's right there in the title. This is the kind of film which sees fit to puncture its own seriousness by placing Song into a diving helmet during an action scene, for little obvious reason beyond that being an amusing thing to do in the middle of a war movie.
The focus on the Weirdness is partially just about making sure we feel the film as a comedy rather than a Leonesque snarl, I suspect, because large parts of The Good, the Bad, the Weird aren't necessarily "silly"; they're just damn fun. Most vividly, Kim and his cinematographers, Lee Mo-gae and Oh Seung-chul, have seen fit to overload the film with swift, energetic camera movements, the most dazzling of which come right at the start, where they can make the most impression. The filmmaking is unabashedly showing off in that opening sequence, racing the camera and down the inside and outside of a train - and what more openly declares "I take enormous joy in movies" as much as a big, flashy train sequence? - and refusing to slow down or settle into a static composition even a tiny bit. It feels like we have to race just to keep up with the film's visuals, and God help you if you're trying to track the story as well. This isn't sustained and probably shouldn't be sustained, though it's tough not to feel that the movie has a saggy midsection, between the unrelenting flair of the opening act and the onslaught of busy action in the final act. It's where the film settles down to tell us more about the characters and how they're slotting into their generically-determined roles to cope with this mad, anarchic world, and in principle that works; in practice, this isn't a film that benefits from Kim's habit of letting character work rise above genre elements, though I appreciate that he doesn't want to just rely on archetypes when he can complicate them. Still, it leads to the film having a somewhat unclear focus, and a film with this many moving parts needs clarity.
Regardless of whether it slows down too much relative to its highest speeds, The Good, the Bad, the Weird is an extremely kinetic, wild thing, and only in this context is any of it plausibly "too slow". The movie's primary mode is delightful mania, a well-choreographed frenzy of everything that could reasonably go into a 1930s war movie and some things that can't, just because it's fun to watch the mash-up speed by. Above all things, this is desperate to avoid boring its audience, or to leave us standing still for long enough that we could even imagine being bored.
Tim Brayton is the editor-in-chief and primary critic at Alternate Ending. He has been known to show up on Letterboxd, writing about even more movies than he does here.
Categories: action, comedies, korean cinema, movies about wwii, westerns
