NEW WORLD. (2013) DIRECTED BY PARK HOON-JUNG. STARRING CHOI MIN-SIK, LEE JUNG-JAE, PARK SUNG-WOONG AND HWANG JUNG-MIN. REVIEW BY SANDRA HARRIS. ©
This is one helluva movie. It's a pumping, thumping, bumping-and-grinding powerhouse of a Korean gangster movie, except that there's no bumping-and-grinding in it, not really. Which is odd for a Korean gangster movie.
Normally you'd expect to see the dirty hos being ridden ragged by the gangsters and mistreated by the pimps in a movie of this sort, but there are only two women in this entire film and one of them's a cop. The other one is the knocked-up wife of a cop.
I'm not saying that lady cops and cops' wives don't ever get the ride but if they do, it's not in this film. This film is all about the business of being a gangster and it's so absorbing that I completely forgot about the lack of sex in it. Never even noticed it, in point of fact. That's how good NEW WORLD is.
Here's the deal, as we say in the gangster world. No, I'm not part of the gangster world, strictly speaking, but they've granted me special permish to borrow their terminology for the duration of this review. Thanks ever so much, o capo my capo. For those of you who thought a capo was a guitar accessory, it may also take on another meaning when necessary...
Okay, so the chairman of South Korea's biggest crime syndicate has been bumped off in mysterious circumstances, and a power vacuum has been created, a very dangerous thing indeed to have in mafioso circles. A couple of guys are jostling for position as next in line to the throne kind of thing, and they're every bit as ruthless as you'd expect these kind of lads to be.
Jung Chung, a Korean with Chinese antecedents, is one of these guys. He's a flash git who loves to accessorise with designer (or knock-off!) sunglasses and watches and whatnot and throw his weight around a bit but he's likeable too, with his curly hair and goofy grin and his child-like belief that flashy equals classy, God bless him.
Lee Ja-Sung, Jung Chung's sidekick or partner, is a key character here. He's Jung Chung's bro, they've knocked around together on the crime scene for a long time now and they've got each others' backs. Ja-Sung is more sensible and restrained than the impetuous hot-headed Jung Chung, and you'd tend to take him more seriously than his buddy.
But Ja-Sung, played by Lee Jung-Jae who most recently starred in sexy supernatural Korean horror flick THE HOUSEMAID, has a secret. I can't tell you what the secret is but it's pretty much the worst secret you can have if you're a gangster. An allergy to leisure-wear and white trainers, perhaps? That would be terrible, lol. No, believe it or not, it's actually worse than that, but I can't tell you what it is. Spoiler-free zone and all that.
The great news is that the magnificent Choi Min-Sik (OLDBOY and, most recently, THE TIGER) is the police chief here tasked with the job of making things as hard as possible for the gangsters. He turns up where they least expect him to and inconveniences them and subtly threatens them and they pretend that they don't give a shit but you know they kind of do.
No gangsta wants to do hard time, even if the guards do turn a blind eye when you have the fresh ingredients for your patented pasta sauce sent in from the outside. Do you know that if you slice your onions thinly enough, they'll melt in the heat and you can just kind of drizzle 'em into the mixture? That's a gangster-level tip you'd do well to utilise. That's if you really want to replicate the kind of sauce that-a Mamma used to make-a.
No gangsta wants to do hard time, even if the guards do turn a blind eye when you have the fresh ingredients for your patented pasta sauce sent in from the outside. Do you know that if you slice your onions thinly enough, they'll melt in the heat and you can just kind of drizzle 'em into the mixture? That's a gangster-level tip you'd do well to utilise. That's if you really want to replicate the kind of sauce that-a Mamma used to make-a.
Oldboy is fantastic at that deadbeat thing that he does in every film. He's brutally tough but has a soft centre of justice, honesty and compassion at his core that always stands to him in the end. He always does the right thing in the end as well, even if he bends a few rules along the way.
He's looking well here too, not clean-shaven but not exactly hipster-level bearded either, nice solid body that hasn't yet run to fat and all the weathered facial cragginess and ruggedness of a Charlie Bronson in his prime. In fact, in the promo picture for this movie he's a dead ringer for Bronson, which is no bad thing. No-one was as tough but fair as Charles Bronson in his day and that's a fact. 'Hey, pally!'
When it all starts kicking off between the warring factions, you can expect a lot of bloody knife violence but not as many guns as you might imagine. There's this hilarious scene where three lowlife scumbags are sent to 'take out' the lady cop. And not to dinner either.
They turn up at her workplace armed to the teeth with lethal-looking knives and machetes and looking for all the world like they just walked off the set of a Mexican bandit movie. 'We don't need no stinking badges...!'
They look like the scum of the earth, like the kinda crimmos who'd slit your throat from ear to ear and take a dump in the hole just for fun. (Excuse my French, I'm just trying to build up a little atmosphere here.)
When they try to gain access to her workplace, she scares the shit out of them by firing off a shot or three with an actual gun. Terrified, they run away like little girls, squealing 'Nobody told us there was gonna be SHOOTING...!' or words to that effect. Very funny stuff indeed.
The gangster's life is an insecure one. We know from HBO mob drama THE SOPRANOS that mobsters live in perpetual fear of being ratted on by squealers. Remember when Big Pussy Bompensiero turned out to be a rat and Tony got the trots and Tony, Silvio and Paulie Walnuts shot Big Pussy on the boat but 'not in the face, Tone, please. Can I keep my eyes...?'
Well, I woulda been strict with him and told him that he shoulda thought about his precious eyes before he decided to squeal on Tony to the Feds but whatever. He's swimmin' with the fishes now. And do you remember when Adriana La Cerva was befriended by that walking bitch Danielle who turned out to be a cop and Adriana was so freaked out she puked on the Feds' table and some of it got on her pocket dog? Sure ya do.
The gangsters in NEW WORLD are the exact same, always trying to ferret out rats, moles and, um, maybe even ferrets themselves. They spend so much time on rat extermination that they should really just go into the actual extermination business and be done with it.
It'd make a good front and every gangster needs a legitimate business so that he can pretend that all his earnings come from there but they so don't, haha. Everyone knows that mobsters' money comes from prostitution, numbers and other related 'rackets,' I believe they're called. They can stick their fingers in any racket whatsoever, as long as it's lucrative. The gambling racket, the Pokemon cards racket, the tanning salon racket, the tennis racket and so on and so forth.
You sure as shit don't want to get caught ratting out the Mob. The Korean mobsters are every bit as imaginative as the Italian-Americans and they like to take their time over their revenge. Everyone in NEW WORLD is totally suspish of everyone else and, in some cases, they're right to be. There are spies everywhere and even the walls have ears...
This is such a good-looking, stylish film. The cars, the suits, the jewellery, everything costs a fortune or at least looks like it does. The gangster Lee Joong-Gu shows us how it's done. He's one sleek and elegant mutha-f**ka with expensive tastes. He eats f**king steak for breakfast. That is pure f**king class, that is. He's a great character too.
The ending is fantastic and comes straight outta THE GODFATHER, the ultimate Mob movie. NEW WORLD is just such a brilliant film. Even the lack of rumpy-pumpy will not cause you to be disappointed here. Korean gangsters like this, as and of themselves, are the sex. They're all the sex you need, really. And Oldboy is, like, totally, da bomb as always...
AUTHOR BIOGRAPHY OF SANDRA HARRIS.
Sandra Harris is a Dublin-based novelist, film blogger and movie reviewer. She has studied Creative Writing and Film-Making. She has published a number of e-books on the following topics: horror film reviews, multi-genre film reviews, womens' fiction, erotic fiction, erotic horror fiction and erotic poetry. Several new books are currently in the pipeline. You can browse or buy any of Sandra's books by following the link below straight to her Amazon Author Page:
http://www.amazon.com/-/e/B015GDE5RO
You can contact Sandra at:
http://sandrafirstruleoffilmclubharris.wordpress.com
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