Kim Jee-woon
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The title tells us "The Last Stand" is a modern-day Western, borrowing elements of "Rio Bravo" and a dozen other films.
So do any citizens who’ve seen the movies The Last Stand is based on: the 1959 Howard Hawks Western Rio Bravo and John Carpenter’s 1976 sorta-remake Assault on Precinct 13.
Anyway, the sheriff like Gary Cooper in “High Noon” — or maybe it’s John Wayne in “Rio Bravo” — stands in the street of his little Arizonan border town and dares Cortez to come through.
The extreme violence is a distraction, because at its heart, "The Last Stand" is as simple and familiar as a favorite cowboy film - particularly "Rio Bravo," the Howard Hawks classic that had John Wayne, an old coot, a drunk, a green kid and a lovely lady trying hard to bring a well-connected criminal to justice.
It's a modern-day Western -- a souped-up and dumbed-down "Rio Bravo," if you will -- with Schwarzenegger making like John Wayne as border town Sheriff Ray Owens, the last man standing between a runaway bad guy (Mexican drug baron Eduardo Noreiga) and his freedom.
Tossing together spare parts from “Rio Bravo,” “Jackass,” NRA promos and vintage muscle-car commercials, this thin, jokey star vehicle elevates a back-of-the-bar-napkin script with a string of proficient and sensationally violent setpieces.
When a kid finds a severed human ear during one of the opening sequences of I Saw the Devil, you might mistake it for an homage to the comparatively placid world of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet or the dark pop poetry of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
There are references to other films (Blue Velvet, The Silence of the Lambs, Hostel) while never turning everything completely over into homage.
Memories of Murder (2003)
Directed by Bong Joon Ho
influenced The Age of Shadows (2016), I Saw the Devil (2010)
Themes
Set in the tumultuous time during the Japanese occupation of Twenties Korea, the opening scene involving an epic gun battle sets up interplay of the cat and mouse, and the mouse disguised as a cat – finely played by lead Song Kang-ho (Memories of Murder) as ambitious and morally hazy Captain Lee Jung-chool.
It starts with an ending: in 1920s Japanese-occupied Seoul, a showdown occurs between a hunted man, Korean resistance fighter Kim Jan-ok (Park Hee-soon) and his pursuer Captain Lee Jung-chool, played by Song Kang-ho, now iconically recognisable from (deep breath) Bong Joon-ho‘s “Snowpiercer,” “The Host,” and “Memories of Murder,” Park Chan-wook‘s “Thirst,” “Sympathy for Mr Vengeance” and “Joint Security Area,” and Kim Jee-woon’s own “The Good, The Bad, The Weird.” (It’s a resume that serves to remind us that God, we love this golden age of Korean genre cinema, and that ‘Age of Shadows,’ for his excellent performance as well as for many other reasons, sits easily in this pantheon).
Leading the charge is Captain Lee Jung-chool (“Memories of Murder” star Song Kang-ho, a master of morally ambiguous characters), a Korean-born officer who’s betrayed his homeland in exchange for a cushy position with the invading forces.
WHEN IT COMES to revenge movies, South Korea has had its finger on the squicky trigger for over a decade now, with titles like Oldboy, Memories of Murder, and Nowhere to Hide all proving to be superlatively staged, razor-taut films about some remarkably depraved subjects.
It starts with an ending: in 1920s Japanese-occupied Seoul, a showdown occurs between a hunted man, Korean resistance fighter Kim Jan-ok (Park Hee-soon) and his pursuer Captain Lee Jung-chool, played by Song Kang-ho, now iconically recognisable from (deep breath) Bong Joon-ho‘s “Snowpiercer,” “The Host,” and “Memories of Murder,” Park Chan-wook‘s “Thirst,” “Sympathy for Mr Vengeance” and “Joint Security Area,” and Kim Jee-woon’s own “The Good, The Bad, The Weird.” (It’s a resume that serves to remind us that God, we love this golden age of Korean genre cinema, and that ‘Age of Shadows,’ for his excellent performance as well as for many other reasons, sits easily in this pantheon).
Kim Jee-woon’s espionage drama opens with a thrilling rooftop chase, as Japanese police working under Captain Lee Jung-chool (Snowpiercer’s Song Kang-ho) hunt down a Korean resistance fighter named Kim Jan-ok (Park Hee-soon).
As Lee, Song Kang-ho (“Snowpiercer”) mines the internal discord as much as the script allows while struggling over his allegiances, whereas Um Tae-goo is a snarly Hashimoto.
Those in the attractive cast are all top-notch, though naturally the lion’s share of praise goes to Song (“Snowpiercer”) and Gong (“Train to Busan”) – the former for his delicate balance of loyalties as he realizes he’s being played, and the latter for his easy charm wrapped around determination.
The star of “ Thirst ” and “ Snowpiercer ” is typically fantastic, a man conflicted enough to question the role he’ll play in a formative chapter of his country’s history.
Played by the great Song Kang-ho (“Snowpiercer”), he could be a traitor, patriotic mole or opportunist.
Korean director Park Chan-wook explored this theme thoroughly in a trilogy bookended by 2002’s Sympathy For Mr. Vengeance and 2005’s Lady Vengeance, and epitomized by the 2003 cult smash Oldboy, a mega-revenge tale set to an operatic pitch.
Now he goes just as over the top with his take on films like "Manhunter," "The Silence of the Lambs" and "Seven," but while his film works as cult horror, this stylishly uber-violent battering ram of a movie is thematically stale and sloppy in its details.
There are references to other films (Blue Velvet, The Silence of the Lambs, Hostel) while never turning everything completely over into homage.
It may be the most hypnotic serial killer story since The Silence of the Lambs, and it's certainly one of the best thrillers I've seen in a few years.
When a kid finds a severed human ear during one of the opening sequences of I Saw the Devil, you might mistake it for an homage to the comparatively placid world of David Lynch’s Blue Velvet or the dark pop poetry of Quentin Tarantino’s Pulp Fiction.
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974)
Directed by Tobe Hooper
influenced I Saw the Devil (2010)
Themes
In fact, Jee-woon has a taste for the bizarre giving audiences an homage to classics such as The Texas Chain Saw Massacre.
I mean, I don’t go see torture-porn like the “Saw” or “Hostel” films, or the movies that pass for horror coming out of Hollywood.
I do think, however, that it needs to be noted that this is not mindless torture porn of the Hostel (2005) stripe, though it uses a not wholly dissimilar approach in its depiction of violence, and I Saw the Devil can rightly be called a horror movie.
There are references to other films (Blue Velvet, The Silence of the Lambs, Hostel) while never turning everything completely over into homage.
(Exhibit A: The slice-and-dice treatment of John Woo’s “Hard Target.”)
Each one of these sequences is delivered like the climax to a Brian de Palma movie (indeed there’s a shootout in a train station that seems to deliberately echo “The Untouchables“) but there’s also such knotty spy-jinks intrigue going on that at other times it plays like “Betrayal on the Orient Express.”
Assault on Precinct 13 (2005)
Directed by Jean-François Richet
influenced The Last Stand (2013)
Plot
So do any citizens who’ve seen the movies The Last Stand is based on: the 1959 Howard Hawks Western Rio Bravo and John Carpenter’s 1976 sorta-remake Assault on Precinct 13.
Peele’s homework for his sensational star, Lupita Nyong’o, included, according to Entertainment Weekly, “The Birds,” “The Shining,” “Dead Again,” the original “Funny Games,” “The Sixth Sense,” “A Tale of Two Sisters,” “Let the Right One In,” “The Babadook” and “It Follows.”
Before filming on Us began, Peele gave Nyong’o a list of 10 horror movies to watch to prepare for the role: Dead Again , The Shining , The Babadook , It Follows , A Tale of Two Sisters , The Birds , Funny Games , Martyrs , Let the Right One In , and The Sixth Sense .
Films Jordan Peele had his cast watch before making 'Us' “Dead Again” “The Shining” “The Babadook” “It Follows” “A Tale of Two Sisters” “The Birds” “Funny Games” "Martyrs” “Let the Right One In” “The Sixth Sense”…
It’s a little Death Wish and a lot Saw, though the term “torture porn” doesn’t exactly apply.
In the spirit of other South Korean films like Memories of Murder , The Host , I Saw the Devil , and Park Chan-wook's early work, among others, The Wailing thrives on genre crosspollination and tonal hyperbole, particularly a destabilizing contrast of broad comedy with ultraviolent portentousness.
The Wailing‘s tone shifts to super serious and tacks on multiple different endings and rug pulls for another 40 minutes, à la Kim Jee-woon‘s I Saw the Devil.
Na Hong-jin continues to utilize the tense atmosphere found within his two previous films, but “The Wailing” has shades of Kim Jee-woon’s “I Saw the Devil,” which allows the film to explore violently haunting imagery.
Six years after Kim Jee-woon electrified audiences with his bleak serial killer thriller “I Saw the Devil,” one of his fellow Korean auteurs has replied with a riotously mangled supernatural horror film that asks with an impish grin: “Are you sure about that?” Already a monster hit back home, Na Hong-jin’s spellbinding and scatterbrained “The Wailing” is 156 minutes of demented occult nonsense that gradually begins to feel less like a linear scary story than that it does a ritualistic invocation of the antichrist.
The Wailing is also disturbingly gory, and at times on par with Kim Jee-won’s I Saw the Devil.
South Korea has proved fertile ground for genre films, from ruthless revengers such as I Saw the Devil and Oldboy to stranger fare like this year's terrific Train to Busan .
Little wonder, then, that "I Saw The Devil" is one of the year's best films, although I would warn that it is harrowing, visceral stuff. It plays like some fevered middle ground between "Se7en" and "The Game," but that's not to say it's just some Fincher knock-off. Far from it. I'm frustrated that I don't have the credits for the film to refer to, so I'm not sure if it's an original script or an adaptation, or who wrote it. It's a fiendishly clever construct, though. In the film's opening moments, a beautiful young woman is on the phone to her fiancee, who is indeed a South Korean secret agent played by Lee Byung-hun. She's got a flat tire, and she's called for a repair truck to come help her. Instead, someone else stops by, an unsettling figure played by Choi Min-sik . When she says the wrong thing, it's almost like it's the excuse he's been waiting for, and Choi Min-sik goes mad, murdering her with sudden, awful fury. Once Lee Byung-hun finds her body, though, and sees w…
Little wonder, then, that "I Saw The Devil" is one of the year's best films, although I would warn that it is harrowing, visceral stuff. It plays like some fevered middle ground between "Se7en" and "The Game," but that's not to say it's just some Fincher knock-off. Far from it. I'm frustrated that I don't have the credits for the film to refer to, so I'm not sure if it's an original script or an adaptation, or who wrote it. It's a fiendishly clever construct, though. In the film's opening moments, a beautiful young woman is on the phone to her fiancee, who is indeed a South Korean secret agent played by Lee Byung-hun. She's got a flat tire, and she's called for a repair truck to come help her. Instead, someone else stops by, an unsettling figure played by Choi Min-sik . When she says the wrong thing, it's almost like it's the excuse he's been waiting for, and Choi Min-sik goes mad, murdering her with sudden, awful fury. Once Lee Byung-hun finds her body, though, and sees w…
Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)
Directed by Tomas Alfredson
influenced The Age of Shadows (2016)
Plot
Which is a shame, considering how the intrigue-filled premise probably allows for something more sophisticated to come out at the end à la Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, instead of just a properly climatic blow-off as Tarantino would have done it.
For much as Keshales and Papushado’s masterful debut Rabies (2010) used a slasher frame and Coens-style ensemble chaos for its genre-bound commentary on the minefield of Israeli politics, this follow-up imports the twisted tropes of torture and revenge familiar from Korean films Save the Green Planet! and I Saw the Devil (with the odd hammer blow from OldBoy for good measure) to shine a light right in the face of beleaguered Israel’s questionable response to terror.
Some superhero movies have subtitles referring to the dramatic events or villains featured therein: Apocalypse , The Age of Ultron , Civil War , The Last Stand .