Champion: Armwrestler on the Rise

Kim Yong-wan's Champion is an incredibly endearing sports movie with a revoltingly slimy character just off center. Clearly, I'm not talking about the film's hero (Ma Dong-seok), a down-on-his-luck armwrestler who's returned to Korea from the U.S. where he'd been working as a depressed nightclub bouncer. Nor am I referring to his armwrestling sponsor (Yang Hyun-min), an extortionist, mini-mafioso, big time gambler, and all-around bully. No. I mean the protagonist's spiffily-dressed BFF (Kwon Yul), a slick con artist with big dreams that bank on his buddy's full cooperation in questionable endeavors. This plot devise — he's hard to accept as a human being — is so transparent in his shady behavior that you may wonder if the hero has a screw loose or has a debt of incalculable magnitude.

Such payments aside, I was much more interested about our main guy's relationship to his newly found half-sister (Han Yeri) and her adorable kids (Choi Seung-hoon, Ok Ye-rin). In fact, I'd argue that there's a better version of this script in which the oily sidekick doesn't exist at all. Isn't an expat returning to his homeland to find a new family and long-deffered success against the odds enough for us viewers? We don't need to lose the thugs, the corrupt system, the adoption, the wins and losses, the party-crashing, the family bonding, the underdog story, the acupuncture scene, the ex-con rival (Lee Kyu-ho), the inevitably upbeat end. I love underdog stories. But I hate the middleman. Let's drop the middleman! Isn't that always a good policy?

Project Wolf Hunting: Animated, Terminated

I'm not suggesting that the sadistic criminals aren't way smarter than the bumbling cops in Kim Hongsun's ultra-bloody prisoner-escape movie Project Wolf Hunting. But there are still some steps I would've taken once I'd gained control of the Frontier Titan ship whether I was overthrowing my captors at sea or guarding the extradited passengers from the Philippines to South Korea. No matter which side you're on why wouldn't you...

1. Throw the dead bodies overboard.
2. Keep the doctor nearby to administer first aid as needed.
3. Handcuff the pilot to the steering cabin.
4. Keep someone alive for repairs in the engine room.
5. Retain one form of communication with the outside world.

Then again, why do I bring up such concerns when there's maggot-mouthed supervillain (Choi Gwi-hwa) enters halfway through to turn the smiling sociopath (Seo In-Guk) — whom you thought was the primary nemesis — into an expendable secondary character? Though it doesn't reveal the fact until late in the game, Project Wolf Hunting is a monster movie, an over-the-top fright flick in which the evil mastermind is a ruthless gay sex addict who fatally gags the man giving him a blowjob and the final three survivors are mutants who undergone serious gene therapy. Who's behind it all? A pharmaceutical company called Aeon genetics. It's the type of situation that asks: Can one tough woman (Jung So-Min) actually save the world from another military experiment gone awry? Or were Ridley Scott and James Cameron wrong?

Six Ball: Action Cues

One should never mix business and sex. Or business and love. Or gambling and sex and love. And billiards. But if no one ever did, we'd never get a movie like Chae Ki-jun's Six Ball. This clever indie concerns a sweet-faced poolshark (Lee Dae Han) whose rapacious boss (Kang Ye-Bin) is jealous of his mentor (Kim Ah-ra) who also happens to be his one true love and the daughter of a former pool-hall owner (Kim Jin-mo) who lost a lot of money and got the first guy's arm injured in a game by the aforementioned boss' boss (Hong Dal-pyo) who sexually coerces his femme fatale employee. The movie's not as hard to follow as that sentence is but Six Ball does have a plot of intertwining lives and conflicting motives, and characters with short tempers and long-standing animosities.

The acting may be inconsistent but the script isn't. It's pulp with plenty of choice components: back stabbing, tight cleavage, twisted violence, enraged shouting, improbable turnarounds, and costumes that look more "ugly real" than you'd like. There's nothing stylish about poverty here! The outcome of the final contest may seem predestined, though not the extent of it. Plus, most of us will have learned a new game for the billiards table in the process. I, for one, say, "Rack 'em up!"

Remember: Jason and Freddy

Since the Korean War ended in 1953, I'm not sure the math totally works out with Remember, a thriller about Freddy (Lee Sung-min), a beloved geriatric waiter at TGIF, who hires his co-worker Jason (Nam Joo-hyuk) as a driver so he can execute a series of vigilante executions for fellow countrymen who profitted from aligning with the Japanese during occupation. That would make all the guilty men tweens which makes their actions seem infinitely less calculating, although not less upsetting. I personally allowed myself to succumb to this revenge fantasy's logic. Justice is in such short supply lately, that a one-man judge-jury-executioner who's going after slimeballs with good PR teams has serious appeal.

Especially when the two lead actors — Lee and Nam — have such undeniable chemistry. Whether they're evading Detective Kang (Jeong Man-sik) or outwitting a middle-management menace (Yun Je-mun), you never doubt these two have each other's back. And writer-director Lee Il-hyeong's script provides plenty of conflicts that find the two in double-David versus gang Goliath scenarios and last-minute escapes. It's weird to have a movie that's so dark elicit "That's so cute" reactions so regularly but the statement was never made without pleasure. Running over two hours, Remember kept me up late without regret.