The Tiger

Park Hoon-jung's big-budget South Korean blockbuster is a gory, gloomy action-drama set in a Korea, circa 1925, that is occupied by bullying, martinet Japanese troops. In a powerful imperialist metaphor, the Nippon invaders mechanistically wipe out vast numbers of wildlife for their souvenir trophies. The obsessive target of both the Japanese and the starving Korean hunters they use as vassals is the last surviving Korean tiger, the godlike “Mountain Lord,” a battle-scarred 800-lb. beast (clearly CGI but still effective as a character) who is enraged and tearing apart intruders left and right following the killing of its mate and cubs. As with King Kong, viewer sympathies will lie more with the vengeful, increasingly mutilated cat than with any of the humans, although star Choi Min-sik is sympathetic as a peasant hunter tired of all the bloodletting—a man who also has a lifelong, fatalistic bond with the monster tiger. Recommended. (C. Cassady)