South Korea delivers yet another action packed chase between two males in Kim Min-suk's Psychic. If the chase between two characters was not exhausted with The Chaser, Running Turtle, Secret Reunion, and The Man from Nowhere, now comes a supernatural story involving what might be called superpowers that spike the battle between the two leads.
Kang Dong-won (Secret Reunion) plays Cho-in, an inexplicably gifted man who can control people he can see. After having his father kill himself and running away from his mother, Cho-in tries to simply live without working by robbing stores. As he tries to use his power and rob a store, he discovers his superpower has finally found a person who is left unaffected in the place of Kyu-nam. As Kyu-nam absorbs the hero role and tries to stop Cho-in from his actions, the story quickly turns into a high-speed chase between the two where plenty of innocent people die in the process and the audience learns there is truly something different about Kyu-nam as well.
But while the typically action-packed and full of suspense chase in other South Korean productions in the same style, Psychic completely fails in providing substantial evidence as to why anyone does anything. Cho-in's suffering as a child is only depicted in the beginning, where both his parents try to kill him, but it remains unclear why his gift would cause them such pain. When Cho-in meets Kyu-nam and realises he is out of his control, despite there being a reason his distress was obvious, it was unnatural for his rage to escalate so quickly and without being directly provoked, and as Cho-in sets out on a killing spree in order to beat his opponent, the audience might not get any pleasure without understanding why.
Secret Reunion's star Kang Dong-won is a little outshined by Go Soo's acting, who steals the scene entirely. He is well able to portray a person who was at the wrong place at the wrong time and thus had to endure so much suffering, watching his close ones die. At the same time, Kang's character is not mystical enough, but seems rather wacky, and applause for the actor for being able to keep the craziness obvious throughout the film. With a setting and camera work that would have better worked in a horror film or video game, full of dark gloomy colours and a score that adds to the tension, Psychic was not nearly as entertaining or appealing as the recently released The Man from Nowhere.
A film with good potential which unfortunately leaves too many things unexplained for the viewer to ignore. With some decent acting and cinematography that is too dramatic and intense for the events in the storyline, the film fails to deliver emotion and the only realistic drama is well-acted, but not really dramatic. In a film that looks more like a video game than anything else, death seems unreal and the drama of death could not really spread. A decent film to watch nonetheless, with nothing more to it than action sequences and sinister eyes, that leaves too many things unclear and thus sacrifices the enjoyment of the storyline, as a film cannot prove pleasant enough if the question of why Cho-in has only one leg circles annoyingly in one's mind.Labels: research |
