City of Violence, The (2006)

Although a low-budget film, THE CITY OF VIOLENCE lives up to its suggestive title and likely many expectations fans of director Ryoo Seung-wan may have. The filmmaker has been called the Korean Quentin Tarantino and the label fits, to a degree. He’s not a motor mouth like Tarantino but he shares the Hollywood filmmaker’s near obsession with genre films, a trait that has heavily influenced his filmmaking to date.

COV is Ryoo’s most complete and plainly stated love letter to his cinema heroes who range from Martin Scorsese and Al Pacino to Jackie Chan, John Woo and Tsui Hark. Eschewing the pressures of big budgets, bigger stars and the creative interference of money-driven producers, Ryoo has gone indie, and digital, to make his ultimate homage to the genre movie. Like Tarantino’s KILL BILL, COV is jam-packed with nods to classic Shaw Brothers films, chambara movies, Spaghetti westerns, and Hollywood cinema from the likes of Walter Hill and most notably Sam Peckinpah, a filmmaker whose work heavily influenced his editing style.

Unlike Tarantino, Ryoo has additionally forged a tight working relationship with one of South Korea’s top stuntmen and action directors, Jung Doo-hong. The two have worked together on practically all of Ryoo’s previous films since NO BLOOD NO TEARS in 2002. In this way, it would be easier to draw comparisons to Hong Kong filmmaker Wilson Yip who has developed a seemingly similar relationship with action star and choreographer Donnie Yen.

COV’s main weak point is the plot which should not come as much surprise considering Ryoo’s chief aim was to make a kick-ass martial arts movie. He casts himself alongside Jung as childhood friends reunited in their hometown by the unsolved murder of one of their old pals. As a big city police detective from Seoul, Jung puts his skills to work investigating the murder which is tied to efforts by organized crime to cheat locals out of their property for use in building lucrative commercial ventures. On their way towards finding the person responsible for their friend’s death, Jung and Ryoo brawl with gangs made up of teenage b-boys, school girls, hockey and baseball players, and machete-wielding thugs in white jumpsuits.

Ryoo attempts to bolster a thin script with an element of mystery surrounding who the killer is while generating additional filler from drama involving the dead man’s grieving widow and Ryoo’s onscreen brother whose drug addiction played a tacit role in the crime. With generally weak characterizations and story development throughout, none of it resonates on much of any level. Ryoo uneasily shifts from genre excess to realism and it doesn’t gel. I will say that Lee Beom-soo (MY WIFE IS A GANGSTER 3) rises above the limits of his role to create a very satisfyingly wicked villain. Lee is to this film what Simon Yam is to KILL ZONE, a real acting talent given room to stretch in order to compliment the action skills of the stunt actors and offset their limited acting abilities.

The action apart from the story is solid but also displays the limits of that country’s talent pool. Without a doubt, Jung is as professional as they come where the action scenes are concerned. He professes his own greatest strength is in crafting large-group brawls and I would agree. The action finds its greatest success when Jung and Ryoo are hectically battling their way through throngs of fighters numbering up to 100. I’m willing to bet that Hong Kong’s pioneer in group fighting, Tang Chia would approve of the advancements that Jung and his fellow stuntmen from the Seoul Action School (SAS) have made in this area.

Smaller-scale fights betray Jung’s less refined action style. Sure, he crafted meticulous wire battles in ARAHAN but that was more of a copy of other styles than an expression of his own tastes which tend to be more rugged and realistic. This contrasts with Ryoo’s more stylized editing which also play a big role in the presentation of the fight sequences. He intentionally jumps back and forth to multiple fights in progress and uses just about every other trick in the book. This is unfortunate because most genre fans have seen it all already whether we’re talking about split screens, wipes, jump cuts, SteadiCam pans, dramatic zooms, or overheads. When other more prolific and arguably more skilled filmmakers have already exhausted this language of film, its time to go back to a less obtrusive approach or boldly use new technology the way that Robert Rodriguez has for a movie like SIN CITY. Since we’re talking about low-budget filmmaking here, the former would have worked better, particularly as a way of highlighting the strengths of Korean martial art choreography rather than technical filmmaking skills or production design which are elements the country already excels at.

The quality of the stunt work in COV is impressive and shows that SAS has an unusually high degree of talent considering the small number of hardcore action films being produced in the country. Fight work is predictably dominated by impressive taekwondo technique although some effort is made to mix it up with other styles. Weapons combat plays a vital role with two nicely staged weapons battles fought back-to-back in different venues. One sees Ryoo and Jung using wooden swords like clubs in an open courtyard and the other takes place inside when they take up what are essentially kitchen knives to fight their way through a narrow series of Asian-style sitting rooms. Jung apparently has a phobia about kitchen knives and this can humorously be heard during his comments in outtakes and commentary available on the DVD release.

After seeing Jung perform onscreen in films like ARAHAN and FIGHTER IN THE WIND I knew he would deliver and sure enough he is a commanding physical presence when the fists and legs start to fly. I would have liked to see more fist work and filming in less restrictive environments but this is Korea after all and the director has a definite fascination with shooting action in tight spaces. Ryoo also has a martial arts background in Taekwondo and Bulmudo. It was more of a surprise to see him holding his own alongside Jung. It’s all the more impressive, not only because he’s directing himself but because Ryoo injured his knee near the beginning of shooting and had to endure through the rest of it without being able to halt production to heal up. He won’t be replacing Jackie Chan but I doubt you would find too many dedicated film directors who could step up to perform physical action at the same level.

One of the more unusual fight scenes involves Jung’s confrontation with a crew of b-boys all played by members of Draft, one of the country’s top b-boy teams. It’s a scene reminiscent of extreme sports fighters used in films like THE PROTECTOR and some of Jackie Chan’s films. I can’t say it’s a success. The connection to b-boy moves and action choreography goes back to the days of 42nd Street kung fu movie screenings in New York in the late ’70s. Yuen Wo-ping played around with b-boy tricks in Donnie Yen’s first movie DRUNKEN TAI CHI and it deserves more exploration but I don’t think anyone has found a way to make it work as a suedo-fighting style. Action directors are better off sticking with the dance-like art of Capoeira.

This Brazilian style actually does appear at the end when Jung and Ryoo face off against four “super” fighters. The fighters’ other specialties include taekwondo, kickboxing and wushu. This variety definitely spices up the finale although the fighters’ lack of character build-up diminishes the fight. We see them hanging around throughout the movie but they virtually never speak or express emotion. They’re like nameless Shaolin bronzemen out of some old Joseph Kuo movie who provide a warm up to the final challenge. All four of the fighters are impressive and in my opinion deserve a shot at some form of action stardom. Of the four, two stand out especially, the film’s only female fighter Kim Hyo-sun and taekwondo expert Seo Ji-ho who also plays a second role as an assassin battling his way through a police station. This police station scene is less flashy than the others but reminds me a lot of the fantastic work that Corey Yuen choreographed in films like RIGHTING WRONGS (aka ABOVE THE LAW). Interestingly, the scene was shot with all of the lead instructors from SAS playing the police officers. This caused considerable problems during the shoot because Seo was hesitant to strike his martial elders but the finished scene is brutal and doesn’t betray any of the stunt actor’s real-life reluctance to pummel his onscreen opponents.

THE CITY OF VIOLENCE is by no means a bad martial arts actioner and I definitely recommend it to genre fans, especially with its high volume of stylized screen fighting. Even so, I personally found it to be far too clichéd for my tastes. I’ve had my fill of over-indulgent monument flicks by “fan boy” directors like Tarantino and Ryoo. Yes, everybody borrows from everybody else but that should only be your starting point. Ryoo is no newcomer to filmmaking anymore and has done more creative work in some of his previous films, especially with regard to dialogue, characterization and visualization. With COV he’s tried too hard to repackage his favorite film elements simply for the sake of doing it. It’s like writing original lyrics to someone else’s more famous tunes. Based on interviews I’ve seen I suspect Ryoo is well aware of this and was afraid that his film wouldn’t maintain enough of a Korean flavor. It really doesn’t have any flavor at all because he’s mixed too many borrowed elements together that actually had a place in their original works but here just appear as contrived.

I don’t like knocking Korean action cinema because it has a lot of potential and needs support beyond its limited fan base at home. But Korean filmmakers need to do more to highlight the strengths of their indigenous screen fighting arts the way that Tony Jaa and Panna Rittikrai have done for Muay Thai boxing in Thailand. They also need to take a page from Hong Kong’s playbook and build up their stunt actors as stars. Jung looks great in COV but Ryoo failed to make him connect with the audience. It may take someone with the skills and presence of DRUNKEN MASTER star Hwang Jang-lee or the poeticism of a master filmmaker like Kim Ki-duk but it needs to happen in a way that stirs the hearts and minds of Koreans while flooring an awestruck international audience. THE CITY OF VIOLENCE is a fun diversion but with the exception of those killer 560-degree spinning kicks, it’s little more than a disposable genre film remix.