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The Good, the Bad, the Weird
As you might assume from the title, this is basically an extended redo of Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, transplanted to 1930s Manchuria. A rifle-wielding bounty hunter (Jung), a clownish outlaw (Song) and a ruthless killer (Lee) with Asian pop-star hair chase each other while killing off a few hundred extras and a lot of horses. And yes, the score has twangy guitar, plunky banjo, some inspired whistling and a chorus grunting roughly “Hee ho hoo.” So far so Leone. But where Leone specialized in the artful building of suspense punctuated with short bursts of gunplay, Kim opts for extended battle scenes in which bullets fly and most of the sets are reduced to piles of rubble. The operatic slow burn of Leone has been replaced with something a little more contemporary—relentless action.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Kim’s good at his job and knows just when to throw in something silly, like the outlaw donning a diving helmet as armor during a gunfight. Frankly, we prefer Leone’s intensity (and Clint Eastwood’s glaring eyes in giant close-up) over Kim’s brutal kineticism, but we’d take this unusual hybrid over a lot of contemporary Hollywood CGI mayhem-fests.
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