Neombeo 3

Korean Gangster film that appears to be quite excellent, if confusing. I'll probably have to watch it again to see if still appears excellent when I understand what's going on better :D

The movie loosely follows the life of "Gangster No. 3", who doesn't like to be called a "Gangster" and really hates to be called "No. 3". But there's lots of tangents and side stories so it's hard to really say that there's any one focus to the movie... it's got a very fractured structure (hence the confusion).

The movie is strikingly different from most HK Triad movies, and really shows 99% of them up with the intelligence and self-awareness of the script and direction. I guess I don't usually notice just how cliched and unrealistic HK scripts generally are until I see something like this that... well, isn't. Not that cliched and unrealistic is necessarily a bad thing, but you can see why many people are shunning HK movies in favour of Korean flicks these days.

There's quite a lot of subtle and dark humour throughout the movie, which doesn't glamorise any of the characters or their lifestyle... they all take themselves terribly seriously, but the movie likes to gently point out how absurd such posturing is.

I have to admit I struggled to keep track of which characters were allied to which others, and what the hell they all wanted. It didn't help that about half way through the movie the subtitles suddenly go from very good to absolutely nonsensical. I guess they ran the sub script past a native English speaker after translation by a Korean speaker, but after 50 minutes he had to go and catch a bus or something. I couldn't decide if the quality recovered somewhat towards the end, or it was just that dialogue got more sparse :D There's also quite a bit of written material on screen that goes untranslated throughout.

STAR RATING: ***** Saturday Night **** Friday Night *** Friday Morning ** Sunday Night * Monday Morning

No.3 is a Korean production, and presents itself as some kind of gangster spoof, when it in fact turns out to be nothing more than your usual edgy, grey Oriental crime film. It looked a bit of a curious offering to start with, and maybe I had looked a bit too closely into the trade descriptions on the title a bit. And to be fair, it's not bad as a typical sort of Western crime flick. But I'm no expert in this sort of field and maybe there's better types of film out there you could be watching. **

This film did not turn out quite how I had initially expected, a black comedy - this was a little disappointing, though it was still amusing in parts, so that made up for it. There is more violence than humour, though it becomes a little more slapstick as the film progresses.

An amusing and very unexpected conclusion. Though the absurdity of the entire situation throughout is perhaps not appreciated fully, perhaps a little is lost in the translation?

From this film, Korean gangster comedy became the most emergent genre which brought the international fandom to Korean films. The tradition of gangster comedy succeeded to 'Attack the Gas Station', 'My Wife is a Gangster', 'My boss My hero', 'Hi, Dharma', and 'Guns and Talks'.

Besides, two great male actors got their stardom by this film. One is Choi Min-sik (Swiri, Failan, Happy End, and Chihwaseon) who concentrated on stage career in those days, and the other is SONG Kang Ho (Swiri, The Foul King, and JSA).

This film is very funny and enjoyable satire to Korean society. Most characters are obssessed with something - power, hierarchy, fame, sexual pleasure and property. Sometimes these things are exposed with their vanity. Very Enjoyable film.