The girlfriend of an abusive former boxer with dreams of becoming a pop singer teams up with a female taxi driver hounded by loan sharks to steal a large sum of money from an illegal dog fighting racket.

Smarmy pulp noir adequately sums up what No Blood No Tears is all about. Much like its Korean New Wave brethren including My Wife is a Gangster and Attack the Gas Station, edgy style and attitude in acting, direction and camera work dominates a nihilistic frappe of battling punks, losers, and petty gangsters. What is different here are the hyper-realistic and bloody street fighting and two female underdog protagonists who bite back.

Comparisons to films from Guy Richie, Quentin Tarantino and David Fincher are impossible to ignore, particularly Snatch and Pulp Fiction. While making use of out of sequence shooting and freeze framing for comic and dramatic effect, the film’s story focuses on one central event that affects a variety of eclectic characters. The focus is on two women in particular. There’s Kyeong-seon (Lee Hye-yeong), a tough-as-nails taxi driver who has seen better days. Her husband has left her with gambling debts that loan sharks won’t let her forget and she can’t seem to stay out of trouble with the law. Then there’s Su-ji (Jeon Do-yeon) who suffers the abusive hand of her boyfriend, a former boxer named Dok-bul (Jeong Jae-yeong). He was once forced to throw a fight and is now muscle for ‘KGB,’ a gangster who is running an underground dog fighting circuit. After a fateful meeting, the two girls strike up an unlikely partnership when they decide to rob the gangsters of their gambling revenue. As the girls hatch their plan, Dok-bul, the cops, the loan sharks, three street punks, and one silent martial arts-fighting machine (Jung Doo-hong) converges in a series of bloody, bare-knuckle free-for-alls.

Ryoo Seung-wan’s sophomore effort is technically proficient and shows a lot of verve indicative of the aforementioned influences and the exploding Korean film industry its spawned from. The film is painted in rusty, faded hues and low levels of light that leave characters in partial shadow. This evokes a weathered, noir look that enhances the story. The camera work and editing is tight with close shooting, rapid cuts and split screens. The characters are suitably distinctive and well-acted. Jeong Jae-yeong is especially good as the down and out former boxing champ reduced to beating his girlfriend when drunk. Unfortunately, an insightful scene where he’s shown throwing his last boxing match was cut from the final version. This explains a lot about the film’s most complex and interesting character. Where the story and characters falter is when Seung-wan falls into attempts at comedy like showcasing the “United Handicapped Democrats,” witnessed as a gang of reject gangsters. Little bits of comic editing are reminiscent of David O. Russell’s shock humor technique in Three Kings, but it’s much less effective. Further spoiling the mood is the generic synthesized score that sounds like game show music. It’s out of tune with the film’s tone and doesn’t work on any level.

The combat in No Blood is two-sided. First there is the nasty brawling that isn’t about making anyone look like Jet Li, but rather ordinary people clawing and biting to survive. The female stars are generally involved in this style and they get smacked around pretty hard, but manage to return the favor in brutal fashion. Even so, it’s a little hard to watch men giving women full-force punches right in the face. This contrasts with depictions of more idealized martial arts savagery such as when Jeong Jae-yeong outmaneuvers an opponent and delivers an exaggerated uppercut with multiple camera speeds used for emphasis. But this is nothing when compared to Jung Doo-hong, who plays KGB’s enforcer and choreographs the film’s many fights. Doo-hong is one of South Korea’s leading action directors whose previous work includes Musa. He’s Tae Kwon Do-trained and has been working in films since the early ’90s, mostly behind the camera. The stylized direction makes it difficult to actually see any of his moves, but he definitely comes across as a powerful and effective martial arts brawler. A climatic match between Doo-hong and Jeong Jae-yeong takes place, appropriately enough, in the dog fighting ring. The rapid cuts and close, jerky camera movements are frustrating as they obscure a lot of detail in the choreography, but it’s still a very gritty and satisfying fight high on impact. Director Ryoo Seung-wan narrowly manages to make the two combat styles mingle effectively, although he tilts more towards realism than traditional screen fighting heroics.

No Blood No Tears borrows heavily from other sources and isn’t quite as hip as it tries very hard to be, but it is an entertaining and well-made film with solid acting, great direction, a few interesting plot twists, and a lot of grim fighting. Modern martial arts film fans should especially warm up to Jung Doo-hong’s wicked performance, despite the heavy editing.

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