Tomb of the River: Paid in Blood

This movie has too much stabbing for my taste. There's also plenty of — somehow more acceptable — men wielding pipes but these secondary gangfights always build to a stabbing so the pipe-brawls feel like they're basically teasers for what's yet to come. As to who's killing whom in Yoon Young-bin's jopok joint Tomb of the River, I don't know if it matters. Everyone's playing king of the hill here: power-grabbing Min-seok (Jang Hyuk), slow-witted if loyal Gil-seok (Yu Oh-seong), eternal second banana Cheong-seop (Lee Hyun-kyun), traitorous Mu-Sang (Kim Joon-bae), and the archetypal godfather (Park Jeong-hak) because where would a movie like this be without him. Most of these thugs are going to take one to the heart (via multiple stabs, regardless of rank). Interestingly, the best standoff ends up being a fistfight between two secondary henchmen. Kapow!

After the majority of ToTR's riffraff gets offed, the central conflict looks as though it might shift from gang versus gang versus gang to dirty businessman versus dirty cop. No such luck. The primary detective (Park Sung-Geun) has verbal swagger but can't walk the talk. A sleazy businessman (Song Young-kyu) enters the game late and leaves early. Stab, stab, stab. The body count is high. The final face-off takes place between exactly whom you'd expect: two well-dressed hoodlums. The underlying question turns out not to be whether the good bad guy or the bad guy is going to come out on top. It's whether there's really any difference when you're building Asia's biggest casino right before the next Olympics.

The Great Flood: Rain, Rain, Go Away!

An asteroid has hit earth. There's flooding. There's rain. There's less panic then you might expect. Will anyone survive? Weepy Dr. Gu (Kim Da-mi) has a shot since the robots are focused on rescuing her and shooting her into space. But if humanity must depend on this scientist to survive then we might be better off extinct. Gu has been doing work on implanting emotions while the robots have been working on making human bodies. Time for teamwork, in theory. But how empathetic is our heroine? When disaster strikes, she seems pretty quick to pass by other people to save her child which is, as she knows, a robot. Other kids in need? Pretty much a passing concern. An elderly couple in an apartment? Not even worth a second thought. Looks like Gu is ensuring the future of robotkind, not mankind. Valid to some.

The robot child (Kwon Eun-sung) isn't esppecially endearing. The special effects, I mean the tsunamni-level waves, look unlikely to survive. Not that this is real life. It's a movie. Or a video game. Or an apocalyptic fantasy (with antiquated walkie-talkies) intended to appease the A.I. overlords? Their representative here, bossy — none-too-bright Hee-jo (Park Hae-soo) — has been sent by some agency to ensure she survives, or maybe to ensure they survive, or maybe to forge a bond. He claims he can't feel emotions so I'm unsure how to interpret his irritability. System malfunction? Or how so many people can hold their breath underwater for so long. Or how a cellphone can survive extended time underwater. Or the idea that guns are the answer. Or how many lives I'd have to live to get it right. (It's a relevant thought related to Kim Byung-woo's loopy scifi movie that I won't explain because... Spoiler: Deja vu.)

Recalled: Amnesia - Past, Present, and Future

In the movies, it never bodes well when a rich woman (Seo Ye-ji) wakes up in a hospital with amnesia and doesn't recognize her dashing, mysterious husband (Kim Kang-woo). When you find out this married couple is planning to emigrate from South Korea to Canada very soon, your suspicions are heightened. This man is not to be trusted. When he says to his wife, "You didn't take your pills," you want to scream at her: "Do not take that medication, girl!" When he says, "Let's forget everything and leave," you want to say, "Run, bitch, run!" And yet you can't. So she's left to her own devices, while having intense visions that leave her deeply shaken.

Are they delusions? Premonitions? Remembrances of her own damaged past? Neither we nor she can be sure. Two detectives (Park Sang-wook, Bae Yoo-ram) investigating the potential domestic violence flagged by the team at the hospital from which she was discharged are uncovering the truth as quickly as they can. Can these two cops work fast enough? Can she put the pieces of the puzzle together herself? Writer-director Seo You-min wants to keep us guessing: Who did it? What did they do? Why did they do it? Where is this going? And what kind of medicine's been prescribed? Is being psychic a side effect? Side note: I gather she's an heiress... but to what? Where are her people? Surely, she has a personal assistant who could provide some moral support and a reality check...or pencil in any time traveling.