Terracotta 2012 Review: MY WAY (Mai Wei)

★★★★☆

My Way is a film that reveals how filmmaking works. Directed by South Korean Je-kyu Kang, this is an archetypal ‘big’ film. It is a film that travels across the globe, from Korea to the UK. It is a film of big subjects: war, patriotism and identity. It is a film of massive set piece battles, and high emotional drama. It’s also bloody long: almost 2 ½ hours. It is the kind of film that marketers have extremely private dreams about. And yet, My Way is revelatory because it is a good film, not because of the ‘big’ elements, but because of its smallest moments.

My Way is set in and around WW2, and concerns itself with the globetrotting romp of two marathon runners: the Korean Jun-shik Kim (Dong-gun Jang) and the Japanese Tatsuo Hasegawa (Jo Odagiri). Though friends as children, as men they are forced apart the conflict of national sentiment sparked by the Japanese occupation and colonisation of Korea. Tatsuo, fiercely loyal to Imperial Japan, regards the Koreans as an inferior people, undeserving of respect. Kim however refuses to accept becoming 2nd class, stubbornly claiming the rights and dignity he feels he and his countrymen are due. Through their struggle, the two men end up fighting across the world, having become immersed in the greater conflict of WW2.

This naturally makes for a film built around spectacle and action set pieces. How the marketing department must have rejoiced. This is a film with at least 3 big battle sequences, 2 riots, multiple beatings and 1 rickshaw time trial. In other words: jaw-dropping sights, big explosions, punching and that little bit of laughter for the trailer, and a lot of square-jawed heroic posing for the posters. Even better, there is enough of all that so you don’t even have to worry about spoilers when putting the trailer together. Not to mention that all these spectacle-driven sequences are shot and assembled very nicely. The battle scenes in particular are excellent. Editor Gok-ji Park nicely balances the number and placement of wide, spectacle-shots with the more personal, mano-a-mano (or mano-a-tank) variety, crafting battlefields of arresting scope and brutal impact.

But the massive amount of spectacle is also problematic. Now don’t get me wrong: I love a bit of bang with my buck. This film has plenty of content that can only be described as Cool (I challenge you to describe the sight of a legion of Soviet tanks stretching across the Manchurian plains as anything but). But thing is, Cool doesn’t last. Seeing the vast panoply of military hardware stretched before you, hearing the thunder of the guns and the rattle of the rifles, all that is Cool the first time round. However, by the second time it has already lost impact, and My Way has 2 ½ hours of such scenes. Past the halfway mark my reaction to the spectacle was more boredom than awe. But again and again my interest was recaptured, because, though My Way is a big movie, is does not neglect the little things.

See this is no Michael Bay film, where the action sequences exist to look cool and nothing else. These fights are laden with character and subtext. The character of Tatsuo is fully established and developed in the fire of battle. Also, it is a battle sequence that serves as a heart-breaking conclusion to the arc of Lee Jong-dae (In-kwon Kim), Kim’s best friend. It is moments of character like these that kept me interested throughout the increasingly samey combat, and caused the film’s ending to be a sequence of unrestrained joy. Thanks to a story that bore the hallmarks of careful planning, despite being slightly overstuffed with content, and a legion of convincing performances, My Way proved a massively entertaining experience.

My Way is no character study, that’s for certain. But the adventures of Kim and Tatsuo show characters don’t have to be complex to be identifiable. Hell at one point in their relationship, big softy that I am, I was brought close to tears. But what did that was not the spectacle or the scale. It wasn’t the big bits. It was the little things. And it really says something bad about the industry that when selling films, it advertises the former, not the latter.

- Adam Brodie

Rating: 15
Release Date: UK TBC
Directed By:Je-kyu Kang
Cast: Dong-gun Jang, Jô Odagiri, Bingbing Fan, In-kwon Kim
Film was reviewed at 2012 Terracotta Film Festival In London