One should never mix business and sex. Or business and love. Or gambling and sex and love. And billiards. But if no one ever did, we'd never get a movie like Chae Ki-jun's Six Ball. This clever indie concerns a sweet-faced poolshark (Lee Dae Han) whose rapacious boss (Kang Ye-Bin) is jealous of his mentor (Kim Ah-ra) who also happens to be his one true love and the daughter of a former pool-hall owner (Kim Jin-mo) who lost a lot of money and got the first guy's arm injured in a game by the aforementioned boss' boss (Hong Dal-pyo) who sexually coerces his femme fatale employee. The movie's not as hard to follow as that sentence is but Six Ball does have a plot of intertwining lives and conflicting motives, and characters with short tempers and long-standing animosities.
The acting may be inconsistent but the script isn't. It's pulp with plenty of choice components: back stabbing, tight cleavage, twisted violence, enraged shouting, improbable turnarounds, and costumes that look more "ugly real" than you'd like. There's nothing stylish about poverty here! The outcome of the final contest may seem predestined, though not the extent of it. Plus, most of us will have learned a new game for the billiards table in the process. I, for one, say, "Rack 'em up!"
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