Fist & Furious: Cut to the Knife Fight

Fist & Furious isn't worried about being too obvious. A voiceover informs us immediately that Detective Yang (Jung Doo-hong) is a good cop who's been compromised by a gambling debt. His latest partner Yoon (Kim Sa-kwon) announces, upon his arrival, that he's a newbie who owes Yang his life. [Cue substantial flashback.] These details are important to get across quickly because the dialogue is intended to framework one excellent fight sequence after another.

Neither we, nor the North Korean expat / Dongjim TV News Reporter Nam (Ryu Deok-hwan), has rarely seen the 1 versus 100 battle done so consistently effective. Yang takes on a fireside gang of thugs with the lid of a pop-top can of tuna as his weapon; Yang knife-fights a gang of thugs who run across the top of pews inside a church between slayings. To describe Yang as tough is an understatement. We literally hear him crack bones under his foot. He's also survived having a knife embedded in his head. Not so lucky is the guy who gets bashed on a guardrail after he's underestimated Yang's fury.

That aforementioned knife, by the way, once belonged to the whore-mother of Yang's nemesis, a diabolical drug-dealer named Jung (Jung Eui-gap) who's got his own score to settle. We know this because Jung tell us as much for no compelling reason. As for the far-from-helpless young women caught in the middle of the drama — two sisters played by Seo Eun-ja and Kim Hae-In — they're as much props as people. They're here to get us, and director Ha Won-jun, from Point A to Point B. And by point, I mean a knife.

The Carnivores: Unlikable Rapist Saves Rape Victim

God, how I wish Yoo-joon (Kim Jeong-hoon), the main guy in The Carnivores, had not raped his married girlfriend in the beginning of this movie. And I wish that he had not, shortly thereafter, become a Peeping Tom, who watched — albeit silently horrified — as a 20something villager (Cha Ji-hun) was sexually assaulted by multiple men night after night. But wishing can't make it so. Especially when misanthropic writer-director Ha Won-joon's wishes are so contrary to my own. Ha wants to create an antihero that's despicable, deplorable, dumb. Ha wants to present a rape victim (not a rape survivor) — giving her a knife and night blindness so that she can't use the knife when the men come to attack. The best you can say about this script is that no one has the cards stacked in his favor: All the characters are equally stupid. This uniform idiocy means that the "hero" has to retrieve a professional-grade camera in order to visually document any crimes instead of using his cellphone; that a pair of townsmen tracking the escaping couple needlessly trade weapons before splitting up in the woods, only to reconnect again not much later after one of the two townies is dead. (He got his foot stuck in a bear trap then his head bashed by a stone.)

This is a universe in which traumatized children euthanize their ailing mothers as a way to achieve closure, old waitresses are still subject to sexual harassment while pouring drinks at work, and drunk war vets sit in a circle and laughingly recount their most unforgivable crimes... People are heinous, aren't they? But for that matter so are some actors. How else to label a person who would accept a role in a movie that's so outrightly misogynist? No one went into this production hoping to make art so who do you hold accountable for the inadvertent message, gross as it is? The Carnivores is a low-grade fright flick that doesn't scare or care. It sickens. As B-movies go, Hera Purple this is not.

Spygirl: The Pleasure That Causes Shame

Don't listen to those liars!!! I would never recommend Spygirl to a friend under any condition. It's just a silly romantic comedy filled with pretty young things doing pretty dumb things at the Burger King. (This young cast is so cute that the notion that the "new girl" is the real beauty doesn't actually make any sense. This is what happens when you don't cast ugly people, folks!) Furthermore, you'd have to hold a gun to my head to get me to admit that I laughed at all the stupid antics of the central doofus or cried an actual tear when this selfsame guy massaged the feet of his love interest instead of jumping her in bed. Far from endorsing Spygirl, I'd say this was a slight, reckless piece of entertainment that perpetuates dangerous romantic comedy myths like stalking is cute, klutziness is adorable, and boring people will win you over if they simply persist long enough. That you might see the names of director Park Han-jun, screenwriter Ha Won-jun or teeniebopper Kong Yu in upcoming posts is simply a coincidence. My taste is much more sophisticated. Watching an attractive woman practice her martial arts on bourgeois boors might be fun but it's not enough to make a movie great.