THE TITLE SAYS IT ALL FOR THIS ONE : "THE GOOD, THE BAD, THE WIERD"

This is yet another film I have taken an embarrassingly long time to get round to. It was shown – and I purchased it – in the Istanbul Independent Film Festival a couple of years back, and then literally forgot it existed for about four years (Yes, that IS how big my film archive is). I came across it just the other night, it was one of those nights when, you know, you want to watch something, and you just have no idea what you want to watch. Five minutes of this… Nah… Ten minutes of that… Mm, maybe later… At around my eleventh try – and I was on the verge of considering a very early night at this point – I randomly started watching this one. Now, you know that, with classic films, usually the first 15 minutes of a film is exposition – setting the scene – then “something exciting” that starts the ball rolling usually begins (wise men and women have discovered that if the exciting thing takes longer than that to happen we tend to get bored. Usually. The Godfather, for example, is an exception to this, but then again it is an exceptional film). Anyway, so I start watching this film, right? 15 minutes in, I am excited, invested in the story – and yet I have no idea what is exactly going on!! The adrenaline (and there is A LOT of it in this film) and intrigue – kept me glued to the screen. By the time I had figured it out completely, it was about 40 minutes into the film and I simply had to watch it. Because I HAD to know the end of the story… Awesome, exciting and funny, if you need something to pep up a boring Sunday night, look no further!
Ok, so, the context of the film is so crazy and complicated that I actually needed to go online and check when the damn thing was set. It’s 1940’s Manchuria. (Manchuria, for those not in the know, is a region comprising Korea and China). Anyway, in the 1940s, Manchuria was occupied by the Japanese army. In this confusion lawlessness was pretty much rife. In the midst of everything, a mysterious map appears on the “Ghost Market” (market for stolen goods) one day. It disappears pretty quickly, because everyone – Chinese bandits, the Japanese army, the Korean resistance movement, not to mention any number of Korean gangsters and ne’er do wells are all after the map. No one is quite sure what it is a map of, but rumor has it, it’s a great buried treasure dating from the Qing dynasty. Thus starts our story. But where will it go? How will it end? You will have to watch the film itself to find that out…
First up, if the name wasn’t a big enough clue, yes, this is basically a western set in Korea, and made by Koreans. Now, don’t wrinkle your nose up at it; like I just said, it’s one of the most amazing things I’ve seen lately. The Western themes are skillfully mixed with a very specific brand of Eastern humor. There is a whole plethora of characters (I mean, I have been a bit sketchy about that part but it’s on purpose; I want you to go through that bewilderment and excitement of trying to figure out what the f..k is going on in the first half hour too. It’s not confusing at all, it’s great fun and I literally couldn’t stop laughing. My point is, there are actual protagonists. Three actually. Yep you got it : The Good, The Bad and the Weird. Just like the classic movie hehe). Oh I seem to have forgotten half a sentence at the beginning of that parenthesis. I’ll start again shall I? Ok, there are a plethora of characters and yet each is distinct, memorable and once you actually figure out what the heck is going on the story isn’t difficult to follow at all. The one thing I may “knock” about it, is the fact that the whole historical context of the thing is not actually explained until well into the second half. In fact, I got the year it was set in by checking online, the whole thing is very ambiguous and they use horses one heck of a lot for transport so I actually thought it was set a lot earlier, like turn of the century or something. But even without context, it’s just such fun and so funny that really, you can’t find fault with it. One of the funniest films I’ve seen in a long, long time.