The action loses spectacle with shaky effects and cartoonish staging. The action is bigger, and curiously, there is considerably more English dialogue than there was in the first. The Witch: Part 2: The Other One, at times, feels akin to Colin Trevorrow’s The Witch: Part 2. It honored blockbuster beats while imbuing its narrative with perverse, frenetic, and violent touches. For all its excesses, the first entry was a transgressive, welcome restructuring of superhero mythos. In fact, in many ways, The Witch: Part 2: The Other One feels considerably more commercial than the first. Hoon-jung shifts from present to past and antagonist to protagonist on a whim, stalling momentum with distinctly Western credibility. Timelines are confounding and transitions feel arbitrary. While there is ostensibly a great deal more going on, it lacks urgency. While The Witch: Part 1 was most often maligned for packing its slim narrative to the brim with visceral excess, The Witch: Part 2: The Other One doubles down, ping-ponging between several distinct narrative threads, none of which yield nearly as much interest as the Kyung-hee focal point. Both a direct sequel and not, Hoon-jung returns with The Witch: Part 2: The Other One, maintaining the same self-aware titling while piling on considerably more viscera and excess. The kind of gonzo palate cleanser tellingly dethroned in Korean cinemas by none other than Ant-Man and the Wasp. Ostensibly an amnesiac, Ja-yoon grew into a well-adjusted young woman, only to find the organization that imprisoned her on her trail. Ja-yoon escaped from a lab in childhood and was resultantly adopted by a rural family. But the mythic, good versus evil structure was there. Not that the first film’s protagonist, Kim Da-mi’s Ja-yoon, was strictly speaking a hero. With its uber-violent, horror-tinged take on conventional superhero origin stories, it stood out. Park Hoon-jung’s (writer of I Saw the Devil) The Witch: Part 1: The Subversion barreled its way into the superhero canon. Withholding information that the main character knows makes it impossible to feel what they’re feeling, and the reveal inevitably falls flat, which is what happens in The Witch: Part 1-The Subversion. It works because the viewer’s understanding and the character’s understanding changes together. And when the big reveal comes, the audience’s shock is Crowe’s shock too. He’s showing us the world through Crowe’s eyes. Night Shyamalan isn’t tricking his viewers. Bruce Willis’s Malcom Crowe in the classic The Sixth Sense doesn’t know he’s dead. Those fights might have been enough to make up for the slow start and the two-dimensional characters if it weren’t for the twist, which I won’t spoil. She lives the kind of power fantasy that’s normally reserved for male characters. It’s also great to see Ja-Yoon beat the everliving s*** out of people. Many of the combatants are powered, and it’s fun to watch them dismantle squads of stormtrooper style fodder. Park elects to go more of the 2000s realistic fight scenes, full of chaotic quick hits. It’s not enough to overcome the slow start, but the fight scenes are pretty damn cool. Related: Parasite’s Big Night at the Oscars is a Big Win for Horror He brings a pitch-perfect goofy, supervillain energy to everything he does. His performance is one of the highlights of the film. The previously mentioned Parasite ’s star Woo-sik Choi stars as the unnamed leader (credited as “Male English-Speaking Witch”) of a group of powered escapees who are also chasing her. Two opposing factions from within the institute want her back. RELATED: Seo-joon Park Exorcises Demons with His Fists in The Divine Fury On the way to and from Ja-Yoon’s second appearance on Birth of a Star, Park introduces the different groups that are after her. What starts out as the story of a star (albeit one who escaped from a supervillain training camp) being discovered turns into an action movie in the second hour. Like other Korean films - Parasite, A Tale of Two Sisters, The Wailing, and The Divine Fury to name a few - The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion jumps between genres. Watching The Witch: Part 1 - The Subversion is something like that. Imagine listening to an hour long joke when you know the punchline. What makes the decision so strange is that the power’s nature is fairly obvious. Related: I Saw the Devil: The Pursuit of Revenge
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |