Background: Director Chan-Wook Park has become a cult hero since the release of his 2003 revenge thriller Oldboy. That movie with its distinctive style and its ability to plumb the depths of the human psyche has made it a must watch for anyone who loves film in the modern age. The movie has even reached a small amount of mainstream success through a poster prominently featured in the geek/spy show Chuck. Director and Reggie Miller provocateur Spike Lee is planning an American remake right now.
Oldboy is but one of Park's movies though. In fact it was the second of his acclaimed "Vengeance Trilogy" including Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance from 2002 and 2005's Lady Vengeance. Recently, he's also gotten a lot of press from his latest movie, a vampire tale called Thirst. The Vengeance Trilogy and Thirst are recognizable for their violence first and foremost, but I'm A Cyborg, But That's OK is listed as a "Romantic Comedy." Chances are this one isn't gonna quite the same amount of bloodshed, but hey, you never know. It does, after all, star Rain, Korean Pop Star turned American box office flop artist as the star of the movie Ninja Assassin.
Plot: Let me get this out of the way first: The opening titles are really great. Not knowing Korean though, I think they might have extended into the opening sequence, but I'm not sure. The camera very clearly focusses on a few words in the actual environment of the opening, and the last one is the title, so they're probably more credits, right? Anyways, about that environment that those credits are in. A girl named Young-Goon hears voices that tell her to slit her wrist, insert some wires and plug them suckers in. For some reason, this is interpreted as a suicide attempt and she's committed to a psychiatric hospital.
She's admitted by a kind, over-sharing sort of nurse. She tells gruesome stories of other patients in the ward. One of them wears a rabbit mask made out of cardboard. The nurse says this is because while he was in the army, he was gang raped and had cigarettes put out of his face. She says he was once quite handsome, but now he's so damaged that he even went as far as to sew his own anus shut. But it's all a joke because she was an inmate too! Mythomania they call it.
Young-Goon's problem is that she believes herself to be a literal killing machine. She thinks she's a combat cyborg with guns for fingers, talks constantly to inanimate objects and needs electricity to recharge her batteries. Because of this, she thinks she doesn't need food, which is a problem for the orderlies. She finds out through a radio she has with her that her Grandma is in critical condition. She needs to get out of the facility and help her, so she needs to get rid of her sympathy and murder some orderlies to get out.
The masked man is the other main character worth mentioning. He is Il-Sun, a kleptomaniac schizophrenic. He doesn't just steal possessions though. He can also steal the attributes of the other patients, everything from compulsively walking backwards to one man's ping-pong ability. He's who Young-Goon goes to about her sympathy problem. She wants him to steal it away, but it really only gets weirder from there.
Why Was It Forgotten? This movie is about as far away from the movies Chan-Wook Park has become known for as one movie can get. It actually feels a lot closer to the whimsical nature of a movie like Amelie, but I totally hated Amelie and rather enjoyed this one. It has all the themes of a movie featuring cyborgs. Like Blade Runner, it asks what it really means to be human but that is absolutely the start and end of all the similarities to Blade Runner.
The movie milks the cast of crazies for a lot of its comedy. this works sometimes, but gets old rather quickly. The backwards walking guy, the obese lady, all of them are fun the first time you see them, but never again after that. That's not to say that every character is completely annoying all the time, only when they're trying to be funny. Someone who has a higher tolerance for whimsy might really really love this movie.
What Went Right? This is unmistakably a Chan-Wook park film. The style of the shots and layering of themes into seemingly simple movies are staples of his films and to ally present here. He also known for his expert storytelling and that's on full display here. Also, since Young-Goon believes herself to be designed to murder, there's plenty of fun and stylish violence. There are a few scenes where Young-Goon imagines herself to but gunning down scores of orderlies in dramatic fashion. Surprisingly violent for an otherwise whimsical, easy going movie, really. For being tonally and thematically so different from Oldboy, it's a lot more similar than one would think.
Verdict: An odd film. An odd, odd, odd film.
Score: 80%
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