Jonathan Crocker

Editorial Director | Journalist

Film review: A Bittersweet Life

Posted by Jonathan On January - 1 - 2006

bittersweetGuns, knives, torture, revenge, pain, death… and love. You can’t beat Korean cinema when it comes to belching blood right from the heart. Aiming to max-out Old Boy’s overkill brutality, writer/director Kim Ji-woon ditches the measured chills of superb horror A Tale Of Two Sisters in favour of slicked-up ultra-violence.

Assigned to watchdog the young squeeze of his crime-lord boss, ice-man enforcer Seon-woo (Lee Byung-hun) is rocked to find a shot of warmth pulsing through his veins. Big mistake: his boss finds out and everything goes wrong – horribly wrong. Slashed with a quirky black grin, Kim’s movie gathers vicious momentum as Seon-woo ships and dishes sensational levels of pain. He’s beaten senseless, strung up, crippled, buried alive, then recovers to embark on a face-smashing, bullet-blasting quest for payback. By this time, though, Kim has long run out of ideas, no matter how much carnage he heroically shovels into the plot holes. Jonathan Crocker

RATING: ¬¬¬
 

 

 

Read the original article at Total Film.

 

 

 

One Response to “Film review: A Bittersweet Life”

  1. […] his immaculate horror A Tale Of Two Sisters. He also backs off from the gleaming ultraviolence of A Bittersweet Life as a Good bounty hunter (Jung Woo-seong), a Bad bandit leader (A Bittersweet Life’s Lee […]

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Jonathan is a London-based journalist, critic and editor. He currently works for data visualisation agency Beyond Words.

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