Beasts Clawing at Straws: Survival of the Wicked

"The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily. That is what Fiction means." So quipped Oscar Wilde. And while Wilde clearly didn't have Beasts Clawing at Straws in mind, the 100-something-year-old epigram definitely applies to Kim Yong-hoon's enjoyable thriller. Which says a lot because there are so many bad guys vying for that Gucci bag of cash. Many are psychos: the madam (Jeon Do-yeon), the guilt-ridden lover (Jung Ga-ram), the loanshark (Jeong Man-sik). Others are more like infuriating foils: the foul-mouthed grandma (Youn Yuh-jung) and the jerky manager (Heo Dong-won). Some are just complicated: the indebted call-girl (Shin Hyeon-bin) and the shady customs official (Jung Woo-sung). The only good people seem to be the naive janitor (Bae Sung-woo) and his cleaningwoman wife (Jin Kyung).

If this sounds like a lot of characters, you're not wrong. And they're hardly the only memorable ones. For instance, there's also a cannibal hitman (Bae Jin-woong) who never speaks, and a dim-witted best friend (Park Ji-hwan) who you may quickly write-off as doomed. Yet despite the huge cast, Beasts Clawing at Straws is never confusing or confounding. To his credit, Kim has crafted an intricately plotted crime pic in which your alliances are constanty changing and in a weird way, justice kind of prevails. Granted, in a very twisted manner. Side note: One of the production companies credited at the top is called Artsploitation and Beasts Clawing at Straws more than lives up to that description.

The Outlaws 2: The Roundup

The Outlaws 2 is a very stabby movie. By which I mean, the weapon of choice is the knife for pretty much everyone. That's true for our villain (Son Sukku). Same for his blade-wielding bestie. Same for the brother assassins our villain hires when his bestie lands in the hospital. Same for a bistro's worth of serial sous chefs hired by a rich man (Nam Mun-cheol) to avenge one disarmed son. Everyone bad favors the knife. I mean everyone. Even the deranged hostage-taker in the movie's opening scene. Even the pathetic scam artist (Park Ji-hwan) who's mainly here for comic relief: The diminutive size of his switchblade is a cause for the titters.

Which begs the question. Who, in this universe of stainless steel stained with blood, prefers to fight by other means? And I don't mean the hatchet which also makes at least one appearnace. Well, our hero police officer (Ma Dong-seok) prefers using his fist. His sidekick of a captain (Choi Gwi-hwa) opts for the handgun should one become available. And the rich man's wife (Park Ji-young) who has her own negotiations with the stabbing maniac, she just uses her brains... and when that doesn't work, she runs! Funnily enough, though, the most exciting scene in Lee Sang-Yong's action-packed sequel isn't one of its many slice-and-dice bloodbaths. It's an extended car chase involving many vehicles and not dependent on endless crashes to create the drama.

Please Note: The Outlaws 2 goes by the title The Roundup and you don't need to have seen the previous film to make sense of the murderous mayhem.

Unstoppable: This Husband Is One Hard-Hitting Hero

Let's start with Unstoppable's hero. That's Dong-chul (Ma Dong-seok). He's got the eyes of a puppy dog and the body of a mack truck. That means when his practical, pretty wife Ji-soo (Song Ji-hyo) gets kidnapped to be sold into the sex slave trade, he comes out swinging. "That bro is notorious for his fist," says his sidekick Chun-sik (Park Ji-hwan) and he ain't kidding. This guy punches like a humanoid sledgehammer as he knocks out one thug after another. What's a stab wound or getting hit by an SUV to him? Nothing when it means saving his love from a greedy pimp!

So now let's talk about this movie's wacky but watchable villain. He's the diabolical Ki-tae (Kim Seong-ho), a man with an insane laugh and insaner eyes, a greedy-ass crime lord who can't imagine anything but cold hard cash as a motivator in life. "He's a crazy lunatic who thinks money can buy anything," says someone at one point. Which leads us to believe he's highly motivated since he's incredibly rich. He may have bought himself some kind of superpowers along the way too as he alone seems to be able to survive an endless array of Dong-chul's punches to the head even after emerging from a car crash. Perhaps he invested in titanium steel plates for his skull in a scene that mistakenly got cut.

Together these two are engaged in a fight to the finish. Each has his memorable BFFs — a mulleted private eye (Kim Min-jae) for one; a weasel-y chauffeur (Lee Sung-woo) for the other — but the joys of Kim Min-ho's fast-paced thriller are really those that come with watching a hunky, working class hero beat up the big (Park Gwang-jae), the bad, and the beautiful. To paraphrase a well-known boxing phrase: May the best man win...repeatedly.

Fun Fact: The movie poster's truth-in-advertising tag line is "The beast has been released."