The Witch: Part 2 - The Other One: Here We Go Again

I was thoroughly entranced by The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion, a crazed mashup of evil scientists, ruthless assassins, and rebellious teens whose adolescence has been uniquely challenging. Yet even though The Witch: Part 2 - The Other One has all those elements to a degree, they're neither as prominent nor as playfully done. Writer-director Park Hoon-jung basically assumes we already know that Dr. Baek (Jo Min-soo) is a mad scientist; that the protagonist (Shin Si-a) is the counterpart to prior heroine Koo Ja Yoon (Kim Da-mi); and that a whole military industrial complex is funding the creation and the elimination of these two women warriors. What The Witch: Part 2 is missing, frankly, is a reason for being outside the introduction of a new character.

Luckily for us, this cinematic universe remains pretty entertaining. Once again, the set-up is a David versus Goliath story. Our poor nameless waif is being chased down by genetically engineered and scientifically enhanced bounty hunters who are thirsty for mutant blood. There are a couple of narrative snags, like why go after your prey with weapons you know she's survived in the past when you could increase your chances of overpowering her if you simply doped her during one of her many food-binging episodes? But the history of humankind abounds with people making obvious mistakes over and over and there's nothing to suggest that the characters in The Witch: Part 2 are smarter so much as faster, stronger, and wilder than your average, regular Joes. The people of the future are total animals.

Night in Paradise: The Writer's Gang

One of the advantages of having the screenwriter direct is you will avoid unnecessary improvements to the script such as having the male and female leads tongue or having the good guy emerge complete victor whatever the odds. Park Hoon-jung (I Saw the Devil, The Witch - Part 1) is a master of subverting formula in genre films. Here he's taken a classic jopok scenario — the little guy against the mob — and given it plenty of satisfying twists and turns involving a terminally ill sharpshooter (Jeon Yeo-bin) who never so much as kisses the underdog thug (Eom Tae-goo) who finds himself fighting not one gang, but two.

What he's got is character-driven tension. As for the fight scenes, they're brutal in a way that's strangely pretty. Consider the hero's face which, though covered in blood, has the whitest full-toothed smile possible. Yet if you fault Night in Paradise for not being gritty enough, you'd be overlooking its many pleasures — its thrilling propulsion, its innate sense of justice, its upholding of a Korean cinematic tradition that insists that women are bad-asses, too. Throw in strong performances from Lee Moon-sik as a cop with a shit-eating grin and Hyun Bong-sik as a gun-seller who a single stab can't kill and you've got the makings for some pleasurable pulp. It may not be a brilliant movie but flicks like this are why I started Korean Grindhouse in the first place. Mad respect.

The Tiger: Your Alliance in Man Versus Nature Scenarios

It used to be that in a person-versus-nature movie, the audience always allied with the human being. The hero had to beat nature or at least overcome "the enemy," although victory and/or survival often came with a newfound respect for Mother Nature's powers. Nowadays, the allegiance is not so easily presumed. In Park Hoo-jung's The Tiger, for instance, less-than-favorable examples abound of mankind's disrespect for the planet and its inhabitants: taxidermy trophies of unnecessary slaughters, summarily dismissed pelts, the decimation of forests, the sheer numbers of militia brought on to capture a tiger who only has one good eye! How can you not root for the big cat with the slayed kittens? Bring on the snow, the rain, the cold! Both the Japanese regime — and the unprincipled Koreans who align with them — should be struck down by lightning, swept away by a river, then swallowed up by a tar pit post haste. Forgive us, Mother Earth. Unleash your fury. It's more than justified!

Then again... That's not quite how you feel during The Tiger because none of the animals are truly animals. They're anthropomorphic CGI creations. Which suddenly shifts the battle to new terrain. For are we really rallying behind the beasts of the wild here? To be honest, sometimes it feels like we're cheering for robots or Chuck E. Cheese rejects. That doesn't feel pro-nature. At best, this tiger comes across as a person in a giant fluffy costume. At worst, he looks and acts like a soul-less mechanical being sent from the future to ravage the humans of the past. He's not alone either. All the animals feel unlike animals. Just watch how those wolves scatter like a bunch of video game rodents when threatened by Playstation levels of arsenal.

Naturally enough, that ever-dependable actor Choi Min-sik turns in a commanding performance as a hunter with outdated morals, a man who respects Mother Nature, the mountain, and the kill. Yet despite energetic support from Kim Sang-ho as an obsequious sidekick and the impressive scar added to Jeong Man-sik's camera-ready cheek, even the great Choi can't make The Tiger feel human.

The Showdown: Frenemies With Swords

Do-yeong (Jin Ku) and Heon-myeong (Park Hee-soon) are the kind of best friends who would've been a lot better off if they'd never met each other. They come from warring families and they both want the same woman (Jang Hie-jun) who may be the only interest they have in common. Because Hyeon-myeong is more academic, more intuitive, and more athletic than his BFF, resentments pile up over the years. (This is what happens when there's no other kids in the neighborhood to play with in 17th-century Koreea, I guess.) That Hyeon-myeong eventually tattles on Do-yeong's father and gets him killed doesn't foster much fraternal love either but at least it gives Do-yeong the high ground. Do-yeong is now more loyal and more moral. When these two frenemies end up stranded in an abandoned inn after struggling through a blinding snow storm in enemy territory, the survivors of a Pyrrhic battle that has left most of their fellow soldiers dead, they decide the time has come to talk out their differences, share some secrets and settle the score.

The catch is they're not alone. Do-soo (Ko Chang-seok), a bumbling farmer-turned-fool conscripted into the war and deserter during the battle, is stuck in this ramshackle inn as well. He's not conflicted by past loyalties and betrayals. In a flashback, you learn he's been unfairly drafted, unkindly treated, and repeatedly scammed. As potrayed by Ko, Do-soo is incredibly unlikable but it's hard not to root for the common man when the rich and the royals won't even give him his due when he tends to the fire and cooks up a potato soup for his "betters." Whether he actually adds to the story is debatable. The same can be said for the rival Chinese soldiers who show up in growing numbers at the inn but never really pose a threat or change the dynamic between Do-yeong and Heon-myeong, who, to their credit in writer-director Park Hoon-jung's The Showdown (a.k.a. Swordbrothers a.k.a. Hyultu), never look anything less than fabulous despite the frozen hair, the bloody eyes, the grimy hands, the tattered clothes.

New World: May the Best Buffoon Win

I know I've seen actor Hwang Jeong-min before. He plays a deadpan detective in The Unjust, a snooping insurance agent in Black House, and a doomed lover in You Are My Sunshine. He's always been good but I was totally unprepared for just how great he is in writer-director Park Hoon-jung's New World. Here, playing Jeong Cheong, one of four gangsters vying to be the next Godfather of Korea's largest crime syndicate, he gives a performance that's epic in scale. What's even more impressive is how sneakily he builds that performance, starting off as a stereotype -- an uneducated thug who favors knock-off designer wear and sports a Jheri curl -- and ending up the movie's most complex character. So don't dismiss him as comic relief. Soon enough, his character will develop an edge. Then alongside his peacock posturing, you'll discover a sadistic streak that suggests, though dimwitted, he's dangerous, too. But wait! Even that evaluation must get tossed aside as you come to realize that his buffoonery is a pose, that he's quite savvy to the political web in which he's ensnared. If he's not the spider, then the spider better beware.

But New World, sad to say, isn't Jeong Cheong's story. It's the story of one of the underworld's other rising stars, Lee Ja-sung (Lee Jung-jae) -- an undercover cop who's being asked to stay incognito for the rest of his life as a way to the police force informed until the end of time. It seems a bit much to ask but at least Section Chief Kang, the one asking him to act as "mole" forever, is played by Choi Min-sik who can make any plot device, no matter how preposterous, seem perfectly believable. When Kang outwits the other aspiring crime lord Jung-gu (Park Seong-woon), you believe it. When he quits smoking as a way to honor an unlucky direct report (Song Ji-hyo), you kind of believe that too. You can almost believe his final encounter with one of the movie's murderous hobos. Almost but not quite.

The Unjust: Apparently, Every Side of the Law Is the Backside

A rapist-murderer is on the loose in Seoul, South Korea. But that's of little concern to anyone in The Unjust, a wobbly crime pic in which cops frame mentally deficient suspects, real estate moguls back stab each other to death, and public prosecutors wear their bribes as badges of honor while the psychopath molests and kills another young girl in the city. Apparently, law officials are too obsessed with getting promotions or a new set of golf clubs to be bothered worrying about the sex criminal headlining the nightly news.

It's as if writer Park Hoon-jung (I Saw the Devil) and director Ryu Seung-wan (Crying Fist) are suggesting that a sociopath is nothing compared to the unsavory types employed by the legal system. Prosecutor Joo-yang (Ryu Seung-beom) is more amoral as he extorts public figures and bullies co-workers with his shit-eating grin; big businessman Jang (Yu Hae-jin) is more corrupt as he wheels and deals for supremacy in real estate, with an even shittier grimace; and detective Choi (Hwang Jeong-min) is more desperate as he vies for a supervisor position, his face neither grinning nor grimacing but staring deadpan at the world as if life were a poker game.

The only really pitiable character is convicted child-molester/prime-suspect Lee Dong-seok (Woo Dong-gi), with his missing half-finger. And since he's a child molester, the pity only goes so far. Actually, the one character to elicit true sympathy is Lee's wife. Played by actress Lee Mi-do with startling realism, this mentally incapacitated woman appears to have walked out of a documentary into a so-so thriller. Lost and bewildered with a child by her side, she gapes at terrors and complications she can neither overcome nor understand. I wish The Unjust had justified her look of woe.