Rewind to early summer and erase Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Chrystal Skull (our review) from your mind. Now that it’s gone, get ready for some rip-roaring comedic action at the hands of some of South Korea’s biggest talents. A mix of western and action adventure, The Good, the Bad, the Weird has all the action and comedy I expected from Indy except Ji-woon Kim hits it out of the ballpark.
The story is simple enough: man robs train inadvertently stealing a map to hidden treasure. Said map is being hunted by a group of bad ass bandits while the thief is being tracked by a bounty hunter. The result is a comedy of errors where everyone is tracking the same guy for different reasons. It sound convoluted but Ji-woon Kim and Min-suk Kim’s script is anything but, making excellent use of the pre-conceived expectations that audiences have going in and using them to their full advantage. You already know the plot, it’s how it unfolds that matters. The resulting film is a wild ride of genre mixing which goes well beyond Takashi Miike’s Sukiyaki Western Django. Mind you, while Miike’s film has bits of comedy interspersed, it’s a somewhat serious film while Kim’s western bender is a full out comedy. And what a comedy it is.
Throughout the film, Kim pays homage to the classic western so much so that even I, a self-proclaimed blind woman when it comes to westerns, managed to pick-up some of the hat tips. From the opening scene which plays out like Leone’s Duck, You Sucker through to the closing which seems like something out of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, this is a smörgåsbord of western goodness for connoisseurs of the genre while the rest of us will happily sit back and enjoy the unfolding wackiness which is made all that more fun by Kang-ho Song who wonderfully portrays The Weird. That’s not to say that the other guys, Woo-sung Jung as The Good and Byung-hun Lee as The Bad, aren’t good but they’re overshadowed by Song’s stellar performance.
