The Beast: Action Star Potential

So he doesn't bring the flirtatious fun of Jackie Chan, the charming jadedness of Michael Jai White or the laidback sagacity of Steven Seagal. After viewing The Beast, I would have happily made the case back in 2011 that Jeong Seok-won had that special something it takes to be a major action star. With a cold stare worthy of Jet Li and an earnestness on par with Scott Adkins', Jeong matches his bad boy predecessors with his ability to fight convincingly, brutally, relentlessly. His killer punch and rousing roundhouse kick lift this poorly shot thriller from simple B-movie to B+. It's a sordid tale, to be sure: A vigilante must pummel porn purveyors, pig-masked performers, and seedy sex enslavers in order to rescue his abducted sister (Lee Na-lie) before she gets raped for internet profits nationwide.

Jeong's focus is intense; his acting, irrelevant. Despite cinematography that might as well have been shot on a VHS cam-corder, Jeong looks great even when The Beast does not. The military garb, the torn shirt at the hot tub, the black suit picked up at the gym are as versatile as he's gonna get. And while Hwang Yoo-sik's thriller is fundamentally a testosterone-fueled one-man show, I also enjoyed the lead's getaway driver (Jeon Se-hong), a woman who says "It's okay" when she learns a flaky friend's dead; our Girl Friday appears just in time out of nowhere with a new used car to whisk our hero away.

The Spy: Short on Dialogue

"I'm going to punish you on behalf of North Korea." Thus begins The Spy, a dramatic short by writer-director-editor Lee Woo-suk. After that it's pretty quiet for awhile as our young assassin (Kim Mu-yeol) slips into the Milky Way Coffee Shop, sneaks a loose cigarette from its dirty bathroom then rifles through some salacious calling calls before ringing up a massage parlor that's a front for some top secret operations. Hey, action happens fast when you're making a film that clocks in under fifteen minutes! And the hero has his own constraints to deal with too. With the equivalent of a mere thirty-seven dollars in his billfold wallet, he's supposed to acquire an iPod, some Kinder chocolates, and a pair of castanets. Oh, a life in espionage is strange, strange, strange.

Where do you go to regroup after the stress of killing someone? Well, you can always hop in a taxi and listen to a very chatty cab driver (Lee Dong-yong) who may or may not take you where you need to go. What's to say? Dialogue is scant in The Spy. Perhaps the budget didn't permit a bona fide screenwriter. Perhaps every scene had one take and the cast wore their own clothes. I guess for busy actors such as Kim and Lee, there are worse ways to spend a weekend, casually dressed. Ultimately, The Spy recalls those 48-hour-film festivals that were once all the rage stateside. Perhaps it just took a few years for this fad to catch on in South Korea. Perhaps, perhaps, perhaps.

Made in China: Partly Made by Kim Ki-duk

Although directed by Kim Dong-hoo, the political flick Made in China largely bears the mark of its screenwriter Kim Ki-duk. Many of the auteur's standard ingredients are here: a largely silent central character, the random eruptions into violence, performances that careen from wooden to histrionic... And who else but Kim Ki-duk would build his movie around a Chinese eel farmer (Park Gi-woong) who needs to get his eel tested for mercury by a scientist (Han Chae-ah) who wants to suck his eel in her apartment. That particular relationship gets even weirder when she's wolfing down Chinese snackfood as a way to prove she's not xenophobic so she can get him back into her bed. (I don't know what she was eating but it definitely wasn't White Rabbit Cream Candy.)

Kim Ki-duk has pulled off outlandish plots before — the prison musical Breath, the summer-winter relationship of The Bow — but it's gotta be tough to get into his head as a fellow director. Sure, Jang Hun did it in the terrific action pic Rough Cut. I think that film is atypical for Kim Ki-duk, though, whereas Made in China is more quintessential. Which makes this particular movie feel like an apprentise work being done with the blessing of its mentor who should never be copied or imitated, only respected with caveats.