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OTHER REVIEWS

Korean dark hit `Bad Guy' gets its U.S. premiere at Siskel
By Michael Wilmington
Tribune movie critic
Published February 11, 2005

Kim Ki-duk, most controversial of the hot young South Korean filmmakers, is best known in the U.S. for the pastoral "Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter," his lyrical study of the lives of two monks on a floating island in the mountains. "Bad Guy," Kim's biggest Korean hit, now getting its U.S. premiere at the Gene Siskel Film Center, is a very different affair: a violent, sexy, angst-ridden and tremendously disturbing study of obsessive love in the Seoul underworld of crime and prostitution.

The main characters are a glowering, near-animalistic gangster (played by
Brandoesque Korean TV star Jo Jae-Hyeon), who barely speaks a word in the entire film, and the pretty young middle class college student (Seo Won) whom he accosts in a park and tricks into slavery in a brothel. Their affair is voyeuristic and brutal. The characters around them are mostly amoral psychopaths. The atmosphere is hellish. But out of it comes a genuine, twisted love story that, at the end, may make the hair rise on your neck. " Bad Guy," which won Kim the best director prize at the Berlin Film Festival, is a work by a hard-core artist working with raw candor, deeply personal themes, no brakes and masterly style. It will rock and shock you as few recent Asian movies have or can.

The misfortunes of virtue
by Ken Fox, TV Guide

Our rating: 3 1/2 stars (out of 5)

Not long after ferociously talented South Korean director Kim Ki-Duk induced vomiting in festivalgoers with THE ISLE (2000), but before becoming a critic's darling with the gentler SPRING, SUMMER, FALL, WINTER... AND SPRING (2003), Kim crafted this unusual love story between a mute, lovesick thug and the virginal young woman he shanghais into prostitution. While not quite a dose of cinematic ipecac, it most definitely requires an open mind. The life of 21-year-old college student Kim Sun-Hwa (Seo Won) takes an unforeseen detour the day she's approached in a Seoul park by Han-Gi (Cho Je-Hyun), a hardboiled pimp with a nasty scar across his throat. Transfixed by Sun-Hwa's chaste beauty, Han-Gi assaults her with a long, hard kiss on the mouth. Sun-Hwa's boyfriend and a group of passing soldiers manage to fight him off, but Han-Gi isn't done. A few days later, one of his goons (Kim Yun-Tae) follows Sun-Hwa into a bookstore and plants a wallet full of cash where she's sure to find it. Unable to resist temptation, Sun-Hwa pockets the money and is immediately chased down by the wallet's "owner," who claims she's robbed him of $10,000. He threatens to call the police and forces Sun-Hwa to sign for a loan using the only collateral she has — her body. If she doesn't come up with the payment in seven days, she'll have to leave her old life behind and go to work for Han-Gi. A week later, virtuous Sun-Hwa is a virtual prisoner in one of the storefront bordellos that line the city's tawdry red-light district. She at first refuses to solicit johns and even convinces Han-Gi's other sidekick, Myung-Soo (Choi Duk-Moon), to help her escape. But the plan fails and the by-now fully degraded Sun-Hwa has begun to accept her fate, still unaware that Han-Gi secretly watches her every move from behind the two-way mirror in her room. He's more than just a voyeur: He's fallen desperately in love. It's a scenario right out of Sade, but with one crucial difference that will probably make this film unacceptable to most audiences: It's meant to be a romance and, for better or worse, it is. Even more problematic, Han-Gi and his goons treat one another with a sense of honor and affection that render them close to heroic, and the undeniably powerful bond that ties Sun-Hwa to her captor can't be explained away by simple-minded psychologizing. Beautifully shot and lushly scored, this may be one of the least P.C. love stories ever filmed. But it's one of the most deeply felt.

Cho Je-Hyun plays the perverse,
revenge-obsessed muter Han-gi in Bad Guy
By Prairie Miller
Long Island Press

After the experience of this down and dirty South Korean psychological thriller, park benches may never quite seem the same. Taking gritty urban decadence to such extremes that it slips nearly unnoticed into a lurid and outlandish surrealism, Kim Ki-Duk's Bad Guy is likely as much about its freaky protagonist in question as the artistically brazen filmmaker who had the nerve to invent him.

Han-gi (Cho Je-Hyun) is a really scary-looking thug prowling the streets of Seoul wordlessly, like a mute madman on a personal mission. Han-gi becomes inappropriately infatuated with one stranger, a college girl Sun-hwa (Seo Won), while she sits on a park bench awaiting the arrival of her boyfriend. After grabbing Sun-hwa and forcing her into a prolonged kiss, Han-gi is beaten up by a group of soldiers passing by. Sun-hwa caps off this rude encounter by spitting on the unshaken Hang-gi. Now, any other guy would get the hint and just take the brush-off. But Han-gi's revenge-fueled obsession is just beginning.

After stalking Sun-hwa about town and picking up on a bit of a dark side of her own, he devises a convoluted scheme involving a supposedly lost wallet and compensation for its contents to entrap the otherwise prim young woman, forcing her into prostitution. While Sun-hwa is trapped into a harrowing life of forced sex with brutish customers, Han-gi observes her degradation from behind a two-way bedroom mirror. Her agony is so moving in a warped way to this depraved guy, that he actually begins to fall in love with Sun-hwa.

From this point on, Bad Guy seems to proceed to some alternative universe in an entirely whimsical flight of genre fantasy. The future flirts with the present, as Sun-hwa watches herself walk on a beach and into the ocean to try her hand at drowning. As for Han-gi, he gets sliced right through his body during a couple of brawls, and continues to live. On one occasion, his corpse even gets up from a pool of blood in the gutter to have a smoke. There is a happy ending of sorts, after a lot of sex, stabbing and shopping.

Kim Ki-Duk has somewhat of a reputation as an international arthouse director (Summer, Winter, Fall....And Spring). Art or no art, this kind of graphic pathological violence against women by assorted bad guys just makes for shamelessly bad metaphor. Ki-Duk has lately heard rumors that Hollywood wants him to do a remake of Bad Guy, and he'd love to recruit Brad Pitt for the job. Wonder if Brad is into portable-brothel heaven.