The City of Violence (Jjakpae) first published by Film4
After a man’s unexpected death, his four oldest friends come back together to chew over old times, reassess their childhood dreams, and take stock of where their lives have brought them. It is a familiar enough story, but unlike the baby-boomer drama of Lawrence Kasdan’s The Big Chill (1983), or the dumbed-down comedy of Steven Brill’s Without a Paddle (2004), this film chooses stylised violence as the vehicle to express its bittersweet brand of nostalgia. After all, The City of Violence (Jjakpae) not only stars, but is also written, directed and produced by Ryoo Seung-wan, whose previous films (Die Bad, 2000; No Blood No Tears, 2002; Arahan, 2004; Crying Fist, 2005) have all painstakingly explored different facets of the action genre.
Seoul police detective Tae-soo (Jung Doo-hong) returns to his hometown of Onsung for the funeral of Wang-jae (Ahn Kil-kang), and is reunited for the first time in years with his three other schoolmates, Suk-hwan (director Ryoo), Pil-ho (Lee Beom-soo) and Dong-hwan (Jung Suk-yong). But there is something rotten in Onsung, and as Tae-soo and Suk-hwan muscle their way through the local gangs to find out how their friend was killed, they unravel a perfidious plot involving the small-town corruption and big-town ambition of one of their closest friends.
If Quentin Tarantino borrowed extensively from Asian cinema of the Sixties and Seventies for his revenge diptych Kill Bill, then The City of Violence, along with Kim Ji-woon’s A Bittersweet Life (2005) before it, reclaims the debt in full. For here Ryoo’s climactic sequence, in which a vengeful Tae-soo and Suk-hwan take on all comers in a dining pavilion, draws its imagery from the Bride’s bloody onslaught on the Crazy 88 at the close of Kill Bill: Volume 1 (2003). Yet Ryoo focusses far more on the suffering that his protagonists must endure than on the punishments that they mete out, so that while his violence is every bit as much in the comic-book style as Tarantino’s, it never seems quite as sadistic.
Ryoo’s homages to past western cinema do not end there – for an earlier scene in which the pair are confronted by army after army of teen gangs, each with their own image and style, is a hilariously improbable evocation of Walter Hill’s The Warriors (1979), while many of the film’s battles take place against a brassy Mexican soundtrack that is reminiscent of a Sergio Leone spaghetti western. These characters seem as incapable of escaping outside influences as their town (torn apart by the construction of a new casino), or indeed as their own nation (both elevated and corrupted by the forces of globalisation). As Pil-ho so succinctly puts it: “Korea’s finally become an advanced country, like in American TV shows.”
It is all just another strand of the nostalgia that courses through The City of Violence. Ryoo’s characters are doomed to a past whose promises they cannot fulfil, and to a present that brings only abject disappointment or murderous treachery – and its final line is a resigned “Fuck it!”. Not that Ryoo’s film is all bleakness and despair. On the contrary, it is shot through with an absurdist sense of humour, and plenty of cliché-trouncing surprises. Lee Beom-soo in particular, better known for his comic rôles, here makes for a mesmerisingly atypical villain – a ruthless, permed megalomaniac whose ego is eclipsed only by the chip on his shoulder, and who insists to the end that he, rather than any of his hapless victims, is the wronged party. It is a performance made all the more menacing by its bumbling banality.
Verdict: Knowingly derivative, Ryoo Seung-wan’s action-driven elegy sees friends reunited and violence done in a corrupted Korean town
Anton Bitel
