2 out of 5

Director: Yoon Jong-bin

It’s possible I was let down by this because I was expecting more, but beyond getting a nod from Ebert, I avoided reading too much praise for this flick.  So I think my watching experience is pretty true.

Sometimes I’ll re-watch something and appreciate more about it than I did upon a first viewing, or yeah, have a lesser opinion when I see I was swayed by an early scene or something, but on the whole, I can tell if a film leans toward good or bad (for me) by a pretty simple cue: Do I stop what I’m doing to watch it?  And I try not to do much when I’m watching a flick, because they all deserve my attention, but notable films prevent me from moving for a few moments – a few blissful moments where I’m actually halted by the majesty of what’s on the screen, or by simple interest in What Comes Next.  And with Nameless Gangster, I never experienced that.  In fact, I kept looking at the runtime, I kept pausing it and walking away.  It’s very competently shot, it’s an interesting story, there are some funny, naturalistic aspects that are no doubt charming, and Choi Min-shik gets abused as we always (I always) expect him to, but why am I supposed to care?  I don’t particularly like the main character, and sure, I get the Scorsese reference that Time Magazine made (but seriously, Time, blow me), but unlike something like ‘The Departed,’ say, where there aren’t necessarily too many likeable characters either, we’re dealing with a pretty masterful story teller who knows how to chop up what’s on screen such that he can rest on plot and not characters and still make a wonderful film experience.  Perhaps I’m missing the cultural touch-points that would shape ‘Nameless Gangster’ into that kind of experience, but seriously, cultural experiences, blow me, and if that’s really the case, then I guess that particular style of film-making just isn’t for me.

So.

‘Nameless Gangster’ reminds me of ‘Mesrine’ in that it’s a laid-back portrait of a regular dude’s rise and fall in the criminal world, the plot getting mileage out of the irregular way said dude falters or fights his way through the business.  Excusing that ‘Mesrine’ is based on fact, the story there worked (at least in part 1) due to that character link I describe above – Mesrine isn’t a great guy, but we are on his side due to the magic of film-making.  Choi Ik-hyun (Min-shik) isn’t a great guy.  He’s a baby, he’s constantly wheedling his way out of lies.  And he’s not a great gangster.  Which is part of that naturalistic comedy, and probably part of the commentary – Choi is able to make connections in the criminal world strictly through “I know your father!”  It’s a funny repeated theme, of him getting into trouble, then asking which clan the persecutor belongs to, and lo, Choi worked with so-and-so’s father on a boat or he had lunch with his grandfather yesterday, and how dare you treat me like this…  Min-shik plays this with his usual balance of half-purposeful, half-aloofness, and it’s totally a believable progress.  But for every step he takes to show us that he’s just this sort of clumsily likeable guy – constantly giving away money he does or doesn’t have or offering to treat people who just beat the shoop out of him to lunch – he shows his cowardice or greed by over-stepping his bounds.  Again, I sort of get it – that we should see him as an ‘anti-hero’ (some site called him that) due to his humanity, because we’re all nice guys just trying to get by, guilty of greed and power-hunger, but the blend just didn’t work for me on screen.  The character’s motivations just didn’t click – I just saw him as stupid.  Sorry.

And so his progress up and out of the criminal world – up to his arrest in 1990, where the film starts (before jumping back about a decade to show us how we got there), when the Korean president announces a crackdown on crime, is, again, interesting from afar, but not particularly involving.  Yoon Jong-bin shoots the film pretty straight-forward, everything focused in the center, using occasional foreground / middleground / background layering, but to no great effect.  And the film looks “great,” but just in that crisp ‘great’ look that a lot of films have now in the world of digital and HD.

If you like crime biopics, perhaps you’ll be swayed on this, as, it seems, plenty of critics were.  I dunno.  I think there have been plenty of better films – foreign, American – that have tread similar territory to much greater effect.