There are moments where you watch a sequence in a film and it’s utterly clear the joy behind the camera: the sense of invention (so this is what the camera can do here!), the delight in gaming the audience (playing familiar cards and then shuffling the deck, then cheating), the willingness to push past any sense of limits into a pure sugar rush of genre filmmaking. I smile every time I think of the Thunderdome, of Cary Grant faceplanting in the dust as the plane roars right overhead, of Jackie Chan grabbing any item in the vicinity for balletic battle, of Indiana Jones holding his hat as he first ran from varied and sundry and crazy dangers with the idol in his hand, of Chow Yun-Fat with toothpick dangling and a calm expression on his face gently wiping the blood spatter from an infant’s brow. It isn’t just that these are action sequences, done well; they’re invigorating exaltations of composition and sequence and outsized wondrous plotting.
The Good, the Bad, the Weird has at least 3 such whizbang setpieces, and it’s a dizzy blast of a film. The plot–what? plot? sure, plot–involves a treasure map that one criminal’s been hired to steal, that another criminal happens to steal, and that is bait with which a bounty hunter can entrap that first criminal. The Japanese army want it; the Korean independence army wants to keep it from the Japanese; varied and sundry local Manchurian gangs want it since everyone else wants it.
Two things to note:
1. Kim’s riffs steal ably and nimbly from Leone’s but also Hawks’ westerns, from Spielberg’s most infectious and playful moments, from George Miller’s Mad Max films. But he steals the way they all stole: the hat-tips are subtle, as Kim fully engages with his own tricks and tactics. He’s got, for example, a fascinating sense of space–and the three set-pieces I referenced above occur in very different kinds of environments. The opening runs through and along the linear tube of a steam-driven passenger train, and the camera delights in the clutter and claustrophobia, the gun- and fist-play moves along and exploits (and occasionally breaks free of) the restrictions of that one tight horizontal space. The other two sequences set up equally-interesting spatial problems. A wondrously busy market, chockablock full of ladders up and walkways above and curtains and walls cutting down/off, sets up a dizzy examination of how the gun battle can move both horizontally and vertically. (And I had a huge silly grin on my face as people flew about and up and down on ropes, shotguns and pistols popping.) And the big, open, empty space of the desert becomes a problem in creating suspense for a ridiculous chase sequence: without any landscape, really, how do you make one guy on a motorcycle being chased by legions of horses and trucks from three separate warring factions interesting, let alone comprehensible?
2. The film would still be fun but nowhere near as wondrous without its actors. They’re all quite good, down to the small but clearly-defined supporting cast (the big thug with the sledgehammer, the Ghost Market gang’s leader with his deadpan confusion and his Sherlock Holmes pipe, the pimp with the precise fussy style and the baton). But you’ve got to mention the subtle wonder of Lee Byung-hun as Park Chang-yi, the titular Bad–a role that could easily coast on a typical malevolent charisma, but Lee uses small gestures (a widening of his eyes, the hint of a smile) to create a sense of the innocence once behind this villain, the vulnerability still there.
And then there’s the film’s joyous center: Song Kang-ho, who (playing a vengeance-consumed father in Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance or a shrewd cop in Memories of Murder or a dimwitted father in The Host or a beleaguered minor gangster and family man in The Show Must Go On) is one of the best actors working in film today. Here he gets what some call the Eli Wallach role, but his Weird Yoon Tae-goo is not just a sleazy joke, although (hat tipping repeatedly) there’s more than a hint of Leone’s vision in the type. Song is a great physical comic, squeezing his somewhat puffy face through the thin crack of a door, enduring any number of inconsequential bullet hits directly to the diving mask he puts on. He’s also a great verbal comic, with a limitless arsenal of doubletakes, confounded sighs, chattering sputtering entreaties to various parties (from gun-pointing gangsters to Granny). He seems to channel the history of great film comics, including his ability to imbue this clownishness with a sense of potential threat, of deep sadness. He’s kind of playing Daffy Duck here, but even at the silliest or stupidest Song delineates the character’s humanity.
Sure, the film kind of runs into a wall at the end, not really sure how to wrap up the circus, but that (minor) sense of anticlimax is nothing to a film that could have banked just one of its setpieces as rejoinder to any critique.
Nothing to add beyond that the film is indeed a blast. I spent the first 40 minutes trying to figure out which gang was which and then gave up and realized that it didn’t matter. Each major set-piece begins as homage but then goes beyond to create a perpetual sense of fun. I was thinking more Indiana Jones than Mad Max for the chase in the desert, but regardless, the camera circles overhead, and swoops to ground level to create a dizzying sense of chaos.
Hats off too to “the Good”, Woo-Sung Jung, who had a less interesting role to play, but reproduces a worthy laconic Eastwood. Shots of him using a rope to swing around the Ghost Market and shoot at anything that pops up, and of him riding through the middle of the Japanese army emerging unscathed are glorious.