2008｜139 MIN | Western, Action, Adventure

DIRECTOR KIM Jee-woon

CAST JUNG Woo-sung, LEE Byung-hun, SONG Kang-ho, OH Dal-su, UHM Ji-won

RELEASE DATE July 17, 2008

CONTACT CJ Entertainment

Tel : +82-2-371-5500

Fax : +82-2-371-6340

Email : filmsales@cj.net

Korea’s top genre auteur KIM Jee-woon is currently back in theaters with his ambitious sci-fi action noir ILLANG : THE WOLF BRIGADE, but it’s not the first time that the filmmaker has released a big-budget tentpole at the peak of the summer season. Ten years ago, he made his first large-scale film The Good, The Bad, And The Weird (2008), a uniquely Korean and irreverent take on the western genre.

Set in the 1930s, the story takes place in Manchuria, where many Koreans have fled to take refuge from the Japanese Colonial Era back home. A notorious thief targets a train, but unfortunately for him, he does it the same day that a violent gang bares down on the same transport to snatch a map to a great treasure. Also riding the train is a bounty hunter who takes after the thief when he escapes the train, with the gang not far behind.

With colorful production design (CHO Hwa-sung) and costume design (CHOI Eui-young) on top of a very lively score from JANG Young-gyu and DALPALAN, KIM’s ‘kimchi western’, as it came to be known, was a departure for the director, who tried to incorporate his unique stylistic sensibilities into a more broadly appealing package for his first four-quadrant film. Riffing on the title of the Sergio Leone classic, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly (to which it alludes to several times), KIM’s film features JUNG Woo-sung playing the mercenary (the good), his A Bittersweet Life (2005) star LEE Byung-hun as the sinister killer (the bad) and the beloved SONG Kang-ho, previously seen in KIM’s films The Quiet Family (1998) and The Foul King (2000), serving as comic relief as the bumbling thief (the weird).

While less focused than his prior genre films, The Good, The Bad, And The Weird’s sprawling story is vividly brought to life through KIM’s strong handle of Mise-en-scène, which bursts forward with momentum and is layered with clever camera, editing and sound techniques that inject doses of comedy and cool throughout the impressive set pieces.

Though not his most critically adored work, The Good, The Bad, And The Weird was a commercial peak for KIM, after it welcomed 6.7 million viewers to theaters in the summer of 2008. It would remain his most popular film until he released the acclaimed period spy action-drama The Age of Shadows (2016), which reached 7.5 million viewers during the Chuseok holiday season of 2016. Perhaps the most memorable scene in KIM’s ‘kimchi western’ was its opening train robbery, a sequence he would later build on in The Age of Shadows’ own intricate locomotive-set sequence.