MASTER (2017)
Director: Cho Ui-seok
Notable Cast: Lee
Byung-hun, Kang Dong-won, Kim Woo-bin, Uhm Ji-won, Oh Dal-su, Jin Kyung
At this point, the South Korean market is so good at making
thrillers that it’s setting the bar too high for them to even keep up. Master is the victim of that bar
standard. If this film was made in Hollywood, it was easily be one of the best
that Hollywood has made this year if not in the last handful of years and yet,
compared to the two kinds of thrillers that South Korea is producing, it feels
occasionally disjointed and safe.
Master tries to be
a complex socio-political-economic thriller as it takes two heroes and pits
them against a financial criminal mastermind, played with impressive swagger by
Lee Byung-hun, who is running a massive pyramid scheme. This is problematic,
outside of being ambitious, because it’s very dense material. A plethora of
various characters, two leads, and enough plot to make two movies. Two movies
that are jammed into one. The first hour is purely set up, but it’s built like
its own film and reaches a natural climax and everything. The second half then
jumps ahead six months (or more, as memory seems to escape me at this moment)
and proceeds to build an entirely new plot where our leads must re-team up to
find the baddie AGAIN and hunt him down. It’s a ballsy maneuver for the film,
but it’s a lot to consume for a two and half hour piece of cinema. Respect, for
sure, but also not perhaps the most efficient maneuver when both pieces could
have been fantastic films on their own. On top of that, the film is neither the
dark and ambitious thriller nor the overly entertaining and hammy ones that
South Korea is known for producing. It tries to be both and in that effort,
does go far enough in either direction. For many fans, this riding the line
will be wonderful for consumption, but ultimately for this reviewer it felt
like they didn’t want to make a choice one way or the other and it’s a tad
disappointing.