Anyone who has seen (maybe experienced is the right word) Takashi Miike’s bizarro “Sukiyaki Western Django,” with its surreal, digitally painted backdrops and cringe-inducing Quentin Tarantino performance, knows how painful an Asian/Western hybrid can be, especially when assisted by today’s cutting edge technologies. So, it’s undoubtedly with some trepidation that many will greet Korean filmmaker Kim ji-woon’s “The Good, the Bad, and the Weird.”
But please, put those fears aside. For the most part, “The Good, the Bad, and the Weird” succeeds in being a wildly entertaining riff on the Sergio Leone movies that it is so clearly inspired by, bringing with it its own singular visual style. It’s an Asian director riffing on an Italian filmmaker riffing on a distinctly American film genre, but all that muddle is part of the fun.
The film opens with the greatest, most visually exhilarating train robbery since “The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford.” The period is 1930s Manchuria and in short order we’re introduced to the three titular characters: The Weird (Song Kang-ho), a dimwitted bandit; The Bad (Lee Byung-yun), a ruthless killer with an anachronistic J-pop hair style; and The Good (Jung Woo-sung), a straight laced bounty hunter. They’re all after a map, which the Weird unwittingly steals when he robs the train, and the rest of the movie is, more or less, a scramble to get the map, with each character in hot pursuit. None of them really know what the ‘x’ marks on the map (the assumption is that it’s a vast treasure, partially due to the wording on the map’s legend), but they’re certain it’s incredibly valuable, especially after the Japanese and Russian military (as well as a squadron of Chinese gangsters) join in the hunt. You don’t find out what everyone is after until almost the very end of the movie, and the reveal is too good to spoil here.
Kim stages the action sequences breathlessly. He mixes the shaky hand held camerawork of his American contemporaries with long, fluid shots (sometimes digitally augmented) of mounting suspense to create a wholly engrossing visual rhythm that rarely (if ever) lets up. This style is paired with obvious (but not unappreciated) takes on some of Leone’s signature visual elements, particularly as the movie climaxes with a Mexican standoff that could have been torn straight from any of the “Man with No Name” movies. The violence in the movie is occasionally extreme (The Bad is a nasty piece of work), but Kim stages the sequences with such frantic intensity that it leaves its mark without ever feeling too gratuitous. When he wants you to feel a death, like an associate of The Weird who helps try to decode the map and runs into The Bad, you do.
If there’s any downside to all this craziness it’s that occasionally the pieces don’t quite fit. For every inspired bit of gonzo lunacy (like the score by Chang Young-gyu, an amalgam of Spanish and electronic flavors with a fair amount of Ennio Morricone-ish stuff thrown in for good measure) there’s something that falls fairly flat.
A great example of the not-quite-right stuff is that a prolonged amount of the movie is devoted to a kind of buddy cop pairing of The Good and The Weird, which doesn’t really fit either character and slows the movie down considerably, especially since it follows a great shoot out sequence in the Ghost Market, a kind of Manchurian Mos Eisley Cantina. In the end, the characters still lack nuance or depth (even if, Song Kang-ho, from Bong Joon-ho’s “The Host,” is beyond amazing). They may be well articulated cartoons, but they’re still cartoons, broadly drawn and antic.
Thankfully the pluses easily trump the minuses although, at 2 hours and 9 minutes, the film is unforgivably too long. At least the movie is gorgeous looking, with the wide open deserts of Manchuria serving as a lovely parallel to the American west (Kim appropriates the widescreen grandeur of Leone and David Lean splendidly) and every costume and bit of production design is rendered meticulously. It’s just that, after so long, that deathly running time wears you down. If the third act didn’t kick it into as high a gear as it does, you might even lose interest.
All that said, you’ll be hard pressed if you’ve ever seen a movie like “The Good, The Bad, and The Weird.” Its obvious influences aside, the movie feels fresh, an endlessly bedeviling piece of pop entertainment, almost to the point of exhaustion. We can easily see this thing taking on a life of its own as a B-movie favorite of the midnight crowds. Its extremely limited release almost ensures a cult following will spring up, just based on the scarcity of its availability,the epic strangeness of its content and for those truly enlightened geeks who think they can play “spot the reference” (it’s really not that cut and dry). For everyone else, it will just be a really good time at the movies which, these days, is more scarcely available than a treasure map. [B+]