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| LEGEND OF GENKO. Starring - Kim Yun-Jin - Kim Seok-Hoon - Seol Kyung-Koo - Choi Jin-Sil - Lee Mi-Sook. Director - Park Je-Hyun. 2000. Once upon a time… In the shadow of Mt. Holy lived two tribes, Mae and Hwasan. Everything was peaceful until the Mae tribe took up arms and waged war on its neighbours. Out of anger Mt. Holy rose up and cursed the Mae tribe forever, their punishment was to be exiled to the most barren of lands. Years later and the descendants of Mae forge a holy sword with the blood and bones of 1000 Mae descendants. Its purpose is to destroy Mt. Holy and the Hwasan, but the sword is incomplete and it needs one more soul to complete the cycle, the first child of the Hwasan royal family! The legend of genko has about a thousand different names and is bloody difficult to actually track down, when I finally did manage to acquire this I settled down expecting to be overawed by its alleged magnificence. Hmmm. Whilst not being overawed I was mildly impressed but slightly bewildered, just too many things left me thinking ‘why’. For example the basic premise of the movie is about an overly ambitious tribe getting told off for being a bit naughty. They are exiled by a mountain! To a barren land! So why didn’t they just move? But no they hang around for centuries feeding off of each other, why? Just bloody move, grow some rice, breed some pigs, go fishing for fucks sake instead of coming up with this Ian Fleming style over-elaborate plot about a holy sword and a vengeful mountain. Anyway why’s aside Legend of genko isn’t that bad, focussing on Vee a kind of little red riding hood with a desire to please everyone, unfortunately she is destined for greater things and misery follows her like a crippled puppy. In this case dragging two great friends Dahn and Juk, to their own miserable inevitability. Some stunning performances are provided by all three and the support characters also do their part in making for some truly captivating scenes. Alas all is not well as we are treated too often to these Oscar winning type scenarios and eventually they tend to bore rather than intrigue you. The director also seems to have this thing for providing dizzy round the character camera work, whilst being bloody annoying during the deep and meaningful sections it does work well in the fight scenes. It is a more kind of disjointed whizzing about and adds a sense of confusion and claustrophobia akin to that seen in ‘The assassin’. These swords really look like they can do some damage and the guys wielding them don’t piss about, no posturing or fancy wire work is used to pull in the punters neither, just some good old fashioned brutal sword slaying. It is just a shame then that these fights are only too brief and sparse. If only more time had been spent here and less on the character relationships then we could have had a real winner on our hands. Too many questions are raised throughout this movie to make this acceptable to most people, but if you can put up with the inane use of CGI and seemingly half explained plot then there is a half decent film sat hidden under all the gloss. 6******stars. |
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