Tube: Tanks

"You can tell everything about a man by his shoulders," pickpocket Kay (Bae Du-na) tells us about her not-so-secret crush, transit cop Jay (Kim Seok-hun). But if that's really the case, is there really any need to hear him (or anyone else with shoulders) speak? So much of the dialogue is dreadful in Tube that you wish director Baek Woon-hak had simply let the body parts do the talking themselves. If he had, this chase-and-shoot about a crazed killer (Park Sang-min) who holds a speeding subway's passengers hostage in the hopes of getting the oh-so-evil President to kill himself might have emerged as a flashy-if-frustrating art film instead of a clunky, high-budget upgrade of Speed as imagined by Michael Bay. (You've got to love the explosions!) Pure action pic lovers are unlikely to forgive the movie either, though because the gun fights are too one-sided and the fistfights are shot from too close. (You never get a good view of what's happening in either scenario.) Tube is really most effective as a promo for the Seoul Subway System. You'll spot none of the rats that are so ubiquitous in NYC and the high-ceilinged control center looks like something straight out of NASA.

Son of a General II: Ex-Con Gets His Kicks From Raising Hell and Reading Literature

Im Kwon-taek's General's Son was such a big hit that the next year, the director slapped together a sloppy sequel that neither furthers the story nor fleshes out its hero. Gangster-activist Kim Doo-han (Park Sang-min) is back after a short stint in the penitentiary and he's fighting mad! Motivated by either patriotism or petty thievery, he's fallen right back into the same behavior that landed him behind bars: He's executing roundhouse kicks on the Japanese and flirting with the geishas at the local bar. Shame on you, Kim! It's one thing to beat up foreign thugs for your country but a little maturity is called for too. You should pick a single prostitute to be your gal and settle down. Didn't all that time in the clink teach you anything? Well, maybe Kim's judgment and his memory (he seems to have forgotten his lineage again) is clouded by all those congratulatory shots of liquor he's always receiving. He's older now. He's more circumspect. But he can't handle liquor like he once could. And since he's also developing a love of literature after two hired students read the novel Pure Love out loud to him, everyone in town knows his days as a kingpin in a double-breasted suit are numbered. That purple prose is deadly.

General's Son: Gaining Popularity by Kicking Japanese Butt

I'd like to pimp-slap the Foley artist who first introduced the smack of a bare hand on leather as the simulated sound for karate kicks and roundhouse punches. In General's Son, the perpetuation of this tradition pulls you out of a movie that should be more patriotic biopic than martial arts fantasy despite its numerous hand-to-hand combats. The subject-at-hand is Kim Doo-han (Park Sang-min), a real-life gangster-turned-activist who became a national hero after standing up to the Japs during occupation and acting as a Robin Hood to prostitutes. Furthering Kim's myth, director Im Kwon-taek attributes his hero with an aristocratic bloodline and a rear end that supposedly drives the other guys in prison crazy. (Here's a guy with broad appeal!) Adding to the movie's fabulist aspect is its sloppy disregard for period detail: Guys wearing half-cocked fedoras topping greaser ducktails face off in front of strip mall architecture. When it came out in 1990, General's Son was a blockbuster. You could say its immense success helped usher in the slick cinematic masterpieces which would follow in the nineties while acting as a clunky capstone for what preceded. But you don't need to since I just did.

Bitter and Sweet: The Aftertaste of Fluorescent Lights

Film students sweating over an overdue term paper on appropriation should consider Bitter and Sweet the answer to their prayers. A prismatic comedy about office drones (Ahn Sung-kee, Choi Jong-won, Park Sang-min, Song Young-chang) who escape bleak reality via rebellious fantasies, Lee Myung-se's workplace satire overflows with easily identifiable references to Chaplin, The Three Stooges, Dr. Seuss, Singin' in the Rain, The Secret Life of Walter Mitty... The list goes on and on. It's not hard to imagine some happy undergraduate madly scribbling or typing all the ideas flooding his or her mind. Those not working on a thesis, however, will be less excited. Although intermittently amusing (a giggle, a chuckle, no laughs), Bitter and Sweet is more often overemphatic and under-rehearsed. There's nothing sublime about Lee's social critique and the acting is so unpolished you get the feeling that every scene was done in one shot with actors being handed scripts seconds before the clapper snapped and the director screamed "Action!" Visually, you'll see flashes of Hitchock, Minnelli, Tati, etc. What you won't see is something as lively as its source materials.