Movielogr

Rating: 4 stars

All movies seen on 10/15/2007

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The City of Violence (2006)

Directed by Ryoo Seung-wan

Action

Most recently watched by sensoria, lolareels, noahphex

Overview

Tae-su, a detective fighting organized crime, returns to his hometown for his high school friend Wang-jae’s funeral. There, he meets his old friends Pil-ho, Dong-hwan and Seok-hwan and they reminisce. Suspecting something fishy about Wang-jae’s death, Tae-su and Seok-hwan start investigating it, each in his own way. Their investigations lead to a land development project that Pil-ho is directing.

Length 92 minutes

Actors

Ahn Gil-kang | Jeong Seok-yong | Lee Beom-soo | Ryoo Seung-wan | Jung Doo-hong | Ahn Jae-mo | Lee Joo-sil | Park Young-seo | Jung Woo | On Ju-wan | Kim Dong-young | Kim Seo-hyung | Kim Hyo-Sun | Kim Su-hyeon | Cho Duck-hyun | Kim Byung-ok | Kim Kkobbi | Kim Shi-hoo | Yang Hae-Kil | Kim Min-Su

Viewing History (seen 1 time)

Viewing Notes

This review originally appeared as a DVD review for PopSyndicate.com in October 2007.

If it’s violence you want, then CITY OF VIOLENCE is a punch to the face.

Hollywood is more in the habit of importing grandiose epics and moving paintings like Zhang Zimou’s HOUSE OF FLYING DAGGERS, rather than the down and dirty gangland films. Luckily, houses like Dragon Dynasty are committed to kicking the smaller, dirty gems like THE CITY OF VIOLENCE our way in their original flavor before Hollywood realizes it’s out of ideas again and remakes it.

Wang-jae is dead. His once tight-knit family is in mourning and fighting amongst themselves. His lifelong friend, police detective Jung Tae-su, flies into Onsung from Seoul to attend the funeral, seeing his friends Pil-ho, Dong-hwan and Seok-hwan for the first time in ten years. After asking around, Tae-su begins to suspect that Wang-jae never left his life of organized crime behind and he was murdered because of it; Seok-hwan is the only one who believes him. The two begin an off-the-books investigation and start fighting their way through the murderous, gang-plagued underworld that has sprung up in Onsung in the last ten years to find the truth that starts with Pil-ho.

Fighting punks, fighting schoolboys, fighting schoolgirls, fighting BMXers, fighting breakdancers and fighting baseball players; this film has it all and that’s just one scene. THE CITY OF VIOLENCE lives up to its name. Nonetheless, the constant physical violence is nothing more than a mask for the subtextual mental and ethical violence that has corrupted these brothers and the city. It’s a fun watch, but director Seung-wyan Ryoo’s biggest problem is that he doesn’t maintain the film’s tone, going from serious to silly and back to deadly serious; it’s almost as if the two halves of the film were directed by two different people. Seung-wyan’s affinity for odd multi-panel, two-camera overlays at odd, almost inappropriate, times sticks out like a sore thumb.

The special features are, in short, an orgasm of information for the budding film student. There are a stunning twelve featurettes about the making of THE CITY OF VIOLENCE, divided into Pre-Production, Production, and Post-Production. All but one of the featurettes are interviews with director/actor Seung-wayn and other principals in the film. While it’s an exhaustive study in action films, which is great to see, it results in the same information being presented again and again; Seung-wyan tends to repeat himself about his filmmaking influences and styles. Aside from the featurettes, there are also the standard deleted scenes as well as bloopers. It’s rare that bloopers are included in a film, but here they are, presented BLIND DATE-style with pop-up graphics and ““funny”” sound effects. They’re bloopers but they’re not that funny.

With films like THE HOST, Korean cinema is blazing its own trail through Hollywood where Japanese and Chinese martial arts epics have ruled the roost in the past. THE CITY OF VIOLENCE isn’t a highly original film and Seung-wyan admits as much with his admitted homages to THE WILD BUNCH and GOODFELLAS, but it is dark and tragic and, at the same time, a surprising amount of fun.

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