TODAY'S MOVIE REVIEWS: 'Saw' and 'Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War'


I'm out of town until Sunday, so this entry's being written well in advance for auto-upload by my beloved bride; hence, I have no direct links to this week's Oregonian movie reviews. You should be able to find them in their final published form somewhere on this page; in any case, longer "Director's Cuts" of both reviews are also reproduced below.

UPDATE: The (shorter) Oregonian version of my "Saw" review is here; the (much shorter) "Tae Guk Gi" review is here.
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Saw
(dir. James Wan)

Wow. "Saw" is just awful.

What really makes "Saw" awful is that co-writer/director James Wan sets up a clever premise -- and completely blows it. A doctor (Cary Elwes) and a Gen-X smart-aleck (co-writer Leigh Whannell) wake up in a dank industrial room. They're chained to pipes. They have no idea how they got there. And there's a dead man with his brains blown out lying in the middle of the room. Soon they find clues -- notes, tape recordings, secret signs, cubbyholes and hacksaws -- that suggest that an evil mastermind dubbed "The Jigsaw Killer" is trying to either (a) pit these unfortunate fellows against each other or (b) get them to hack their own limbs off so they'll stop taking their lives for granted. Or something.

For 10 magical minutes, you think "Saw" might end up being a clever, conceptual mystery -- that Wan's going to stay in the room for the entire running time, keeping the viewer as disoriented as the doctor and the slacker, while they (and we) try to figure out who's tormenting them, and why.

No such luck. The cleverness is all in the concept. Wan and Whannell either underestimated their audience or someone with money grew bored, because the whole enterprise spins out of control like a coked-up dervish -- leaving the room to explore multiple subplots and ham-fisted flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks) until the movie becomes this silly, blathering, howling, horrible, overwrought pigpile of misdirection.

This movie can be hated from so many angles you'd think it was running for President. For starters, there's the essential tiredness of the "poetic serial killer" trope. (Just once -- just once -- I'd like to see a movie where a serial killer leaves clues so esoteric that no one can decipher them.) Then there's the screenplay, which slathers every bright idea in a thick tar of attitude and illogic. On at least a couple of occasions, Elwes and Whannell sit down and swap stories that lead to 10-minute flashbacks -- when they both know that Elwes' wife (Monica Potter) and daughter (Makenzie Vega) are due to be killed in a matter of hours.

Then there's the acting. Danny Glover is wasted as a former cop obsessed with the Jigsaw Killer. Whannell is all snot and no substance. And Elwes -- who's turned in fine work elsewhere -- is hilariously bad, with his fragile American accent giving way to a fey English whimper as his character's suffering compounds. The last 10 minutes of this movie is laugh-out-loud funny -- with seemingly every character reduced to scenery-chewing primal screams as he or she yells, crawls, wrestles, runs or bleeds.

To be fair, there are a couple of genuinely suprising, albeit ludicrous, plot twists. But Wan packages any and all scraps of cleverness for maximum annoyance. The soundtrack's filled with "angry" corporate angst-rock that rings as false as a writer using too many exclamation points. Even worse, Wan has a habit of under-cranking his camera to speed up the action during key moments -- during a car chase, say, or as a woman is trying to free herself from a particularly Gothic head restraint, or as a middle-aged fellow is tearing himself to ribbons in a field of razor wire. (You know, the boring parts we all want to hurry through anyway.)

It's meant to be stylish. It plays like a music-video adaptation of "Se7en."
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Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War
(dir. Je-gyu Kang)

"Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War" is a difficult movie to describe -- for the simple reason that this South Korean war epic mixes violence and melodrama in quantities no sane American director would attempt.

Directed by Je-gyu Kang, a man described in the New York Times as "the Steven Spielberg of East Asia," "Tae Guk Gi" is the most expensive and highest-grossing film in its nation's history. It's about two brothers torn apart by the Korean War -- but calling it a simple indictment of war's horrors doesn't even begin to convey the hysterically pitched 140 minutes that follow.

Yes, "Tae Guk Gi" explores the brother-versus-brother themes you’d expect to find in a movie where North versus South. But it's not a political film; ideologies are barely hinted at, with representatives of both sides committing atrocities by film's end. Kang is far more interested in war's effect on family and the psyche, and he cranks the emotional volume up into the Douglas Sirk register -- with everyone howling in anguish or ecstasy for much of the movie's running time, backed by a orchestral score that makes John Williams' work for Spielberg seem subtle by comparison.

When shoemaker Jin-tae (Dong-Kun Jang) and his college-bound brother Jin-seok (Bin Won) are happy, they're laughing and hugging and buying each other ice cream and pens and having water fights with their peasant South Korean family. When they're forcibly conscripted to repel the invading North, they say goodbye to their mother from a rolling train -- a cliché that would make Michael Bay blush. (Actually, maybe it wouldn't.) And when the cruelties of both North and South turn Jin-tae into a killing machine who squares off against his more fragile sibling, the brothers devolve into crazed abstractions of rage and love, capable of little more than crying, howling and killing.

And yes, there's also graphic combat footage -- shot in the strobing, limb-flinging style that's pretty much de rigeur in the wake of "Saving Private Ryan." For a while, this seems like a simple use of in-your-face violence to impeach violence. But where Mr. Spielberg might have shown one person ripped apart by a land mine or grenade, Mr. Kang shows it dozens of times -- the film's body count may well be in the thousands -- and he also gives his lead characters a superhuman ability to rain blows upon their enemies without bruising their fists.

The effect is strange and cumulative: "Tae Guk Gi"'s violence takes a journey that parallels its emotional content, crossing the line from war-torn realism to over-the-top action photography to some kind of hyperreal horror splatter over the course of its two hours and change. By film's end, we're traveling in the realm of what John Woo has called "poetic violence" -- mass killing used to underscore peak emotion, a specialty of Woo's in movies like "Bullet in the Head" and "The Killer."

In other words, it's not for everyone -- "Tae Guk Gi" is frenzied, exhausting or emotionally profound, depending on the person (or the person's mood that day). But for fans of New Korean Cinema with strong stomachs for violence and melodrama, there's a lot to love. Mr. Kang is a superb film craftsman, with a knack for staging vast, overpowering scenes of bloodshed, and Dong-Kun Jang runs an athletic circuit of insanity, grit, charisma and tenderness with the assurance of a young Chow Yun-Fat.

The film begs comparison to "Saving Private Ryan" -- thanks to its parroting of "Ryan"'s combat photography and its present-day framing story, in which an older veteran visits the graves of his comrades. But where Spielberg wanted to make a definitive statement about a moment in history, Kang seems more interested in telling a universal story of brothers in arms -- and wringing his dramatic sponge so tightly that that story takes on the operatic tones of myth.


Posted: Fri - October 29, 2004 at 11:01 AM        

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