Clever Turtles

I had been trying to track this movie down for years, but it unfortunately passed out of currency within a few years of it's release. Hopefully it will become more available now that director Kim Ji-woon is getting more attention. The only version available through Netflix, and apparently Amazon, is the Chinese dub (what the hell?) and I never ran across it when I was browsing video stores in Korea.

It was one of the early films from Kim Ji-woon, the director behind last year's blockbuster "좋은놈, 나쁜놈, 이상한놈" ("The Good, the Bad, and the Weird"), and it stars the great character actor Song Kang-ho (who starred in half of the movies I've mentioned so far). Song plays a disaffected bank clerk who is, with his friend and co-worker, the least productive employee at the bank, of all the branches. Constantly bullied by his manager and the local street punks, he is disaffected with the banalities of working life and falling into existential angst when he runs across a run-down pro-wrestling gym. It reminds him of the pro-wrestling he watched as a kid, especially his hero, the heel wrestler Ultra Tiger Mask. He manages to talk the owner and trainer into letting him join the gym and begins competing in local promotions as the cheating heel wrestler, the Foul King.

Like most good wrestling movies, it admits that wrestling is "faked" and a dramatic presentation, but it is really a (comedic) character study of the guys who train hard to perform in the unpopular, low rent local promotions, and how they find an existential release in the parody that is professional wrestling.

I had pretty high expectations for this movie, having spent so long looking for it, so I have to admit it could not really live up to my expectations. It was one of Kim's first movies, and I thought the pacing of the storyline was kind of rough. Nonetheless, there were some funny scenes (some very predictable, some not). But mostly I was struck with how seriously it approached the life of the main character. The gags seemed to come naturally from the dead-serious Song.

Overall, a worthwhile movie, even if you are not a fan of pro wrestling (which I am not) and a pretty good example of workers trying to recover a life outside of the workplace in post-IMF Korea.