Woochi
**/****
Image B+
Sound B+
Extras B-
starring
Kang Dong-won, Kim Yoon-seok, Im Soo-jung, Yoo Hae-jin
written
and directed by Choi Dong-hoon
click any image to
enlarge
by
Bryant Frazer With directors like
Park
Chan-wook, Kim Ki-duk, and Bong Joon-ho doing their level best to
reinvent
genres like the revenge thriller, the lurid melodrama, and even the
monster
movie, recent Korean cinema has been a wellspring of intrigue for movie buffs. You won't get that kind of ambition from Woochi,
a
middle-of-the-road adventure yarn constructed out of bits of Korean
mythology,
formulaic action beats, and Hollywood-style VFX work. It's
featherweight
through and through, adventurous only inasmuch as it switches gears
partway in,
moving from the generic conventions of a period martial-arts film to
those of
an urban fantasy opus set in modern South Korea, where centuries-old
wizards
are vying to retrieve an ancient relic. If you listen carefully enough
during
the quiet bits, you can almost hear the popcorn being chewed.
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Woochi settles for less from the opening
sequence, in which a voiceover explains the film's backstory over a prologue that looks
exactly
like an animated videogame cutscene. (I broke into a cold sweat,
briefly
worried I was going to be spending the next two-hours-plus watching a
CG
cartoon pitched at the "hardcore gamer" audience.) We're told
something about a powerful supernatural being named Pyohundaeduck who
was
secreted deep underground to play a magic flute for 3000 days in order
to
vanquish captive demons, the foremost two in the form of a fuzzy
bipedal rat and
a bunny. All goes well until three bumbling shinsuns
(gods, I think, or
demi-gods–Google's not much help on this score) inadvertently
release
the prisoners. It strikes me as a fundamentally lazy way to open a
live-action
film, especially since it would have been so easy to keep human faces
in the
frame. Even depicting the events from an observer's distance–the
better to
study the reactions of the three dumbshits who opened the cave a day
early,
first merely crestfallen and then flat-out terrified–would have
resulted in a
scene that's scarier, funnier, and more recognizably human in its
implications.
That's the problem
when you make a movie about gods squabbling amongst themselves: you're
stuck
telling a story about a bunch of superheroes. Stakes are hard to
quantify
beyond, you know, demons, and the big fighting set-pieces aren't
especially
suspenseful or thrilling, because you don't have a keen sense of what
these
wirework acrobats can and can't do. You just watch them do it. So when
Woochi tosses
a handful of spell-casting paper amulets into the air to clone himself
several
times over, you mainly shrug and think, "Yeah, I guess a Taoist wizard would
be
able to self-replicate into a small army." I mean, why not?
If you can get your
head into that state of blissful malleability, you'll have your best
shot at
enjoying Woochi, which unspools over 135
leisurely minutes. The first 45
are set in the 16th century, where we meet Jun
Woochi (Kang
Dong-won), an insouciant and mischief-making young Taoist wizard whose
idea of
a good time is using magic tricks to embarrass the king in his own
castle,
compelling his court musicians to break spontaneously into song. It's
this
rebellious streak that lands him in hot water when he's the object of a
convenient
frame-up after the killing of his master. For his transgression, Woochi
is
imprisoned inside an illustrated scroll for 500 years, until he's
eventually
busted out by those idiot shinsuns, who need him
to help them track down
the Rat Demon and the Bunny Demon–both of whom are running amuck in
contemporary Seoul.
The marketing appeal
of this sort of thing is big VFX-laden fight scenes, of course.
Director Choi
Dong-hoon is best known for sleek and sexy heist pictures like The
Thieves,
and I'm not sure about his action chops. Martial arts films at their
best
include in their set-pieces tiny stories of human grace and
athleticism, but Woochi
is edited like a Baz Luhrmann film, with ostentatiously vertiginous
camera
moves that artificially pump up the kinetics. Fight choreographer Jung
Doo-hong
is reputedly the finest in Korean film, yet Kang could be the unholy
love child
of Gene Kelly and Jackie Chan and you'd never be the wiser based on the
quick
and chaotic cuts that fragment his action to smithereens here. Still,
when Choi's
camera settles down, the screen action comes across well enough. I
grinned at
one shot where several of the magically-spawned Woochis hold a bad guy
in check
with long sticks while another Woochi smacks the hell out of him from
behind.
Of course, the gag is broken up into no fewer than seven short shots
and
punctuated with a dopey reaction shot of Woochi's buddies grinning like
maroons. (You know, in case you didn't realize the movie just made a
funny.)
The film boasts a reasonable proportion of wirework, fireball throwing,
and
scenery chewing, though Jung's work here isn't enough to recommend Woochi
on its own.
I do like the movie's
women, especially Seon Woo-seon, who remains just as cool as
a
cucumber as the impeccably-dressed human alter-ego of the bunny goblin.
I'd
rather see more of her one-upping the cocky Woochi at every turn and
less of
the more conventionally dour, middle-aged villain who eventually
dominates the
proceedings. Also good in a pivotal role is Lim Su-jeong, whom
cinephiles may
recognize from A Tale of Two Sisters and I'm
a Cyborg, But That's OK,
as a young widow Woochi falls for in the origin story–and who turns up
unexpectedly in the film's latter-day section. On the other hand, Yu
Hae-jin
certainly makes an impression in the role of Woochi's faithful,
butt-sniffing
man-dog companion Chorangyi, who provides gently vulgar comic relief
but
contributes to the narrative chaos in a film so rife with hubbub that
Terry
Gilliam shows up at one point to tell these guys to keep it down. (Not
really.)
The performances are
of a relatively high calibre throughout, meaning Woochi
scores some
points on charisma alone. Boyish charm is the key selling point for a
protagonist who dresses like "Smooth Criminal"-era Michael Jackson,
plucks the products being sold out of bus-stop posters, and chugs
30-year-old
Scotch straight from the bottle. Kang Dong-won does a pretty solid
Woochi,
although the script never gives him a chance to really dig below the
surface of
the character. The most depth he exhibits comes with his bemusement at
the core
concepts behind Korea's market economy. "Without the king, who feeds
the
people?" he asks. When one of the three aged shinsuns
starts to
explain the concept of big business, Woochi is smugly dismissive:
"Merchants
are cunning people who can even deceive their own parents for profit.
And
you're saying they're feeding the people? The world like that should
have lots
of troubles and worries."
Though Woochi never quite turns into
Occupy the Gangnam District, it does feint in that
direction a couple of
times. When Woochi stumbled across a poster depicting a
recently-vanquished foe
in human form, shilling for a popular Korean hangover-cure-in-a-bottle,
I
briefly imagined the film morphing into a politically-engaged, They
Live-style
attack on the advertising industry, with Woochi taking on a codex of
evil
pitchmen by throwing himself into egregiously cheery ad slicks and
beating the
crap out of the evil puppet-masters who live there. I don't think Woochi
does any more than nod in the general direction of social
criticism–but at
least it nods, and I value that.
And it includes some fun reflexive notes that,
in a kind of corollary to Woochi's relationship with commercial
imagery, draw
attention to the distance between fantasy and reality, such as a scene
where
Woochi conjures an ersatz shoreline in a bid to impress a pretty widow,
a
subplot featuring a high-maintenance movie actress, and a street fight
shot far
from Seoul, against the delightfully artificial backdrops of the
Hapcheon Image
Theme Park, the biggest backlot in all of South Korea. As a brisk,
95-minute
lark, it could be a fun way to kill an evening. Did I mention Woochi
runs 135?
THE
BLU-RAY DISC
The back cover of the Woochi Blu-ray
box–which bills the film as Woochi the Demon Slayer
(a title that never
actually appears on screen)–claims that it "broke all box-office
records
in Korea in 2009." Sounds like quite a feat. I'm not sure how that
figures, considering Wikipedia currently shows Woochi
as the 25th
highest-grossing film in Korean history and only the third-highest
grosser
released in 2009. But a hit's a hit, and Shout! Factory has released Woochi
in a pristine 2.35:1, 1080p transfer that gives up only the slightest
hint of the film's 35mm origins. Grain is minimal, present in just-sufficient
quantities to lend the picture some pleasing texture, especially in the shadows,
while the
image is almost entirely clean of dirt, scratches, and other blemishes.
Digital
dust-busting may be at play, though it's not egregious, and any
sharpening is
similarly tasteful. More notable is an occasionally flat, low-contrast
quality
to some of the imagery that I assume correctly reflects the original
colour-grade; same with the overall coolness of the presentation.
Here's a film
that tilts to the blue part of the spectrum whenever possible. The AVC
HD
compression has been applied judiciously, its video bitrate topping out
at 35
Mbps.
The sound is
presented in 5.1 and 2.0 DTS-HD MA versions for both Korean and
English. The
audio is fine–dialogue and effects are pretty clear in a mix that
regularly
taps the surrounds and the subwoofer without giving the discrete channels
a real
workout. The Korean option is most notable for Kang's much-superior
voice
performance; Woochi's non-verbal utterances and intonations,
in particular, have a
completely different timbre in the English-language alternative.
Technically,
the main difference is that the dialogue tracks are a little louder and
more
shrill in English, leading a viewer to turn down the sound a bit, which
consequently buries the FX tracks too far down in the mix. As usual,
original
language is the way to go.
Unexpectedly, the disc's special features, standard-def across the board, are a delight for anyone interested in the
craft that
goes into a major Asian adventure movie with a ton of wirework. Some of
the
stuff on this disc is shovelware, and it's a bit of a slog–there's
a
26-minute featurette that's nothing but a collection of
previsualization
footage (low-resolution "placeholder" animation that sets the tone
for the finished VFX shots), and a 25-minute "making of" montage of
B-roll footage that's good for superfans but kind of dull for the rest
of us.
We also find a couple of EPK-style fluff pieces where the director and
the cast
talk about how swell it all is and how much they look forward to us
seeing
their film.
The remaining
supplements, however, shed some light on a complex production that
wanted more
time and money. Talking-head interviews, somewhat crudely shot, are
interspersed with film clips and even more B-roll, but the participants
are
generally so candid about their work behind the scenes that the
collected
shorts end up being engaging and quite informative. In one of them,
choreographer Jung Doo-hung explains the logistical difficulties of
some of the
more complex wire-working scenes, noting that 30 takes were required
for a
particularly demanding shot of Woochi standing sideways on a wall
outside of a
house, his walking stick planted firmly in the ground perpendicular to
his
body. In a feature focusing on the visual effects, VFX supervisor Cho
Young-seek notes that the sequence in question required a total of
between ten and fifteen wires attached to the actor, compared to the three or four used in
a typical scene.
Some of the B-roll offers a glimpse of huge, animatronic demon
puppets
that were apparently used on set, then scanned digitally and replaced by CG versions in
post.
Those "dummy" demons are
way scarier than anything that shows up in the finished film. In his
interview,
Cho seems a tad apologetic about this. Cho also addresses that
animated
opening sequence I crapped all over in my second paragraph, above. "We
had
to rush to make [the director's] sequence in a fight against time," he
says, via subtitles. "That's why I still feel some shame, in that
sense."
Another short, approximately six minutes in length, addresses another of my
complaints,
which is the hyperactive editorial technique that cuts the wirework
into
itty-bitty fragments of action, as Choi explains that it's well-nigh
impossible
to capture a wire stunt that's executed perfectly from start to finish.
Instead, he shot as much material as he could, and kept everything for
the
cutting-room rather than printing only the good takes. "If there was a
long shot with a good part in it, we decided to use the good part of
the
shot," he says. "If we hadn't compromised on the scene in that way, I
have no idea how long it would have taken us." Similarly, Choi explains
the dominant shooting strategy of using three cameras for action
scenes, with
an emphasis on moving all those cameras and setting them up quickly to
shoot
the same scene again from three different angles. Because the cameras
were swiftly repositioned, the lights were turned up on set, reducing
the
apparent contrast of the cinematography. I suspect this
technique may partly explain the flatness of image I mentioned above.
The extras additionally allow us a peek inside the
"Action School," where the actors learn the craft of wirework over
thick mats that cushion their inevitable falls. Likewise on board
is a
discussion of the film's production design, the director's thoughts on
what he
was trying to convey in certain scenes (as well as the actors'
techniques), and
some collages of finished and unfinished footage showing the VFX work
in
process. There's also a two-minute trailer for the Korean market.
Lastly, we get nearly 14 minutes' worth of
letterboxed deleted scenes in so-so quality. Most of the VFX work is
unfinished,
as is the soundmix, and timecode and other burn-ins prove distracting. Things start off promisingly enough with a whimsical fable about a fellow
who, acting
on mischievous instructions from Woochi, gets into trouble with his own
greed.
If it's obviously extraneous to the main story, it nevertheless fills out Woochi's
character. There's some extra exposition in dialogue explaining what
exactly is
going on with the demons and their ability to take human form, plus a
mildly
gory vignette involving the aftermath of a prisoner's escape. Some of
these bits
and pieces are merely connective tissue discarded from scenes in the
film's
midsection, but there's a dream sequence that's spooky as hell even in
unfinished form and might be my favourite thing from the film. Does
the
inclusion of all this bonus material make Woochi
a better
movie? No, of course not. It helps me enjoy and appreciate
it a
little more, however, which is a fine result. Woochi is a
pretty solid win from
Shout.
