I'm not above having imaginary relationships with movie stars. I may not put posters on my bedroom walls or gossip about my celluloid boyfriend but there are definitely performers I've enjoyed meeting and looked forward to seeing again; actor whom I wanted to be a bigger part of my life; actors who I miss after I haven't seen them for awhile and greet with pleasure when they reappear. Ma Dong-seok fells into this category: He's in my inner circle, I mean I frankly adore him, although that wasn't always the case.
Over the years, our paths had crossed numerous times: He played the gang boss in Rough Play, a section chief in New World, and an ineffectual detective in Azooma. So sure I kind of knew him but honestly, we didn't really get that close until just very recently. His role as a lovable lug with a pregnant girlfriend in Train to Busan and now his turn as a rebel-thief in Kundo: Age of the Rampant has really brought us much closer than I'd ever expected. People are funny that way. Mind you, he's not the lead in Kundo, Yun Jong-bin's crowd-pleasing, action-packed historical drama about revolutionaries fighting a corrupt government in 19th-century Joseon.
That honor (or responsibility) falls to Ha Jung-woo who plays a politically enlightened butcher with a debt to settle and two cleavers to do it with. And Ha's great. He really is. So are co-stars Yun Ji-hye (as an archer with a low tolerance for bullshit) and Kang Dong-won (as the bastard son who takes his grudges a little too far). But I only had eyes for Ma. I guess that's just the kind of friend I am.
It's so nice to make new friends but you know what? Now I need to find out if Ma is in a film with my other buddy Song Kang-ho. It would be so great if there was a way for the three of us to hang out together for a night. Life is short. Way too short. So spend it with the people you love, right?
No Mercy for the Rude secretly wants to be a gay movie. Take a look at its protagonist (Shin Ha-kyun). He's a fashion-conscious assassin who wears leather underwear and whose best friend (Kim Min-jun) used to dance ballet. And if he's not gay then why's this mute, murdering poet always fighting off the advances of that horny nightclub singer (Yun Ji-hye)? Why's the only way he can have a son to find a stray boy on the street? He's also suspiciously over-concerned about the length of his... tongue. (This last part is supposedly the cause of his lisp!) And isn't it more than a little weird that he's consulted the local urologist about his speech impediment? Do straight guys associate the mouth with the penis? I don't think so. Then what's going on here?! The way he kills men isn't gay. That's for sure. But he does hold his victims in a tight embrace while stabbing them. Probably writer-director Park Cheol-hie was just too scared to make an outright queer movie. He's subconsciously piling on homoerotic tidbits left and right but in the end, No Mercy for the Rude keeps its hero straight. Someone should get Park a date with a man. That way his next screenplay's hero won't have an inability to say "I love you."
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