The Good, The Bad, The Weird

While the title of South Korean director Kim Ji-woon's film may recall a certain celebrated 1966 Sergio Leone spaghetti Western, the sprawling The Good, The Bad, The Weird is light-years removed from its inspiration. Set during the Japanese occupation of Manchuria in the 1930s, the movie follows a trio of rival Korean bandits (Kang-ho Song, Byung-hun Lee, and Woo-sung Jung) who are racing against each other in the search for a mysterious treasure map. While offering some of the hallmarks of the Western genre—horseback chases, train robbing, lethal gunplay, and morally ambiguous characters in fashionably tailored cowboy clothing—the film is closer to slapstick comedy with its dismissively silly, numbingly over-the-top action. All of this adds up to a pan-Asian smackdown as the Korean antiheroes face a number of Chinese bandits along with the full force of the Japanese Army. Unfortunately, the plot is so twisted that it's easy to lose track of the various broken alliances and betrayals in this noisy romp of a film that is full of borrowed style but lacks a substantive foundation to hold it all together. Not recommended. (P. Hall)