Husbands in Action: Bubbly, Bumbling-Buddy Comedy

Husbands in Action is straight up goofy. I say that appreciatively. For Park Gyu-tae's kooky bromantic comedy gradually ingratiates itself to the viewer by never letting its silliness falter. Ex-husband Hwang Choong-sik (Jin Seon-kyu) is the kind of supercop who uses his handcuffs like numchucks and will frame his frenemy for his farts; new husband Lee Min-seok (Gong Myoung) is a veterinarian who drives a van decked out with ears and a tail and can crack walnuts with his barehands; drug-dealing husband Ma Do-joon (Kim Ji Suk) is a dimwit with a strong inner dog and courts his brilliant scientist-wife (Lee Da-hee) by pummeling others. All three men must unite in order to save their loved ones from Kim Yong-gang (Yoon Kyung-ho), a behind-the-times ex-con who wants to get his turf back now that he's been released from jail.

The film abounds with silly details: a reporter (Jeon So Min) whose motives are more romantic than investigative; a police chief (Lee Soon-won) whose got a crush on his star detective. Well-executed character parts like one criminal second banana (Lee Hyun Kul) and Yong-gang's flashy wife (Lee Yoon-a) keep the laughs coming as does a delightfully absurd sequence in which the three main women defend themselves from a gang of attackers by using frozen fish as hammer-like weapons. A true knockout. Just the latest winner from Park who also wrote the touching A Great Chinese Restaurant.

Love Untangled: A Knotty Proposition

Whether to go straight or not has some dramatic, even comic, possibilities in it for a movie if you're talking about sexuality. But if you're talking about hair (like should it be straight or not), the potential for being interesting drops exponentially. In the high school soap opera Love Untangled, the curly hair that curses the ingenue Shin Eun-soo (Park Se-ri) doesn't really seem to matter to anyone. It doesn't prevent the new-boy-in-town Han Yun-seok (Gong Myoung) from developing a crush on her. It doesn't mean the most popular boy in school Kim Hyeon (Cha Woo-min). And she's got a cadre of friends. So where's the obstacle?

When Eun-soo invites Yun-seok into her dad's storage facility does anyone not predict that the sharing of comic books and the folding of origami eggs is going to bind these two together in perpetuity? So what's the point? And yet, as one character says, "Does it have to be useful to mean something?" With movies, sometimes the escape is enough. And Sun Namkoong's Love Untangled isn't a total wash. The homeroom teacher — as played by Jo Bok-rae — could have been given an entire movie all his own, what with his strangely slow delivery and unexplained vibe of light menace. This is the kind of performance that would've fit right in for a Richard Foreman play. Instead we get a dodge ball game, a field trip, an abused mom, and the realization that the cutest boy might not be the ideal boyfriend and the nice boy needs your help.