Watching Ryu Seung-wan’s debut feature, Die Bad is a bit like visiting your dentist for a biannual cleaning. Reclining in that cushioned vinyl dental chair, you may hear some toe-tapping soft rock in the background, notice some fascinating new teeth scrapers or horrifying drills resting on his tool cart, and learn a few tidbits about the life of the man with his fingers in your mouth, but it’s unlikely that a lifelong emotional bond will form out of this oral intimacy. This meeting is purely intended for a cleaning and a check-up and there’s nothing more to it. You won’t be asking yourself a month from now: “gee, I wonder what my dentist is doing? I should call him up.”
Alright, fine, poor metaphor. Not sure why I picked it. Maybe because I had a cleaning last week or I was imagining how most of the characters in this film will need an appointment in the near future––assuming Korean gang members receive proper dental insurance. Anyway, let’s make it clear: like a visit to your dentist, Die Bad will not maintain any sort of emotional grip on you after it ends. The film, a product of four shorts that Ryu Seung-wan shot on a shoestring budget over a couple years, has a very direct and focused purpose without many superfluous transitions or tangents. The viewer is simply dropped into four encapsulated events––all within a span of a decade or more––that revolve around the lives of Seong-bin (Park Seong-bin) and Seok-whan (Ryu Seung-wan), two school friends who grow up to be a gangster and cop, respectively, and find themselves at odds.
While this concept seems rife with drama just waiting to be milked, Ryu only really indulges in a variety of visual styles and techniques. The actual story is rather pared down and minimal––which becomes a double-edged sword. Sure, it’s refreshing to see a director treat his viewers intelligently by allowing us to fill in the large time gaps and he makes mature decisions to cut and keep cutting to focus his story. Unfortunately, there are casualties––nuance and emotion become the knife fodder here. With the exception of perhaps Sang-whan (a character introduced at the halfway mark played by Ryu’s brother, Ryu Seung-beom), every other character is treated indifferently and barely shows any personality because Die Bad––channeling Lee Chang-dong’s Green Fish––is more set on having them hit on specific points to illustrate their confinement in a rigid system and deconstruct certain tropes instead of simply giving us a unique reason to like them. On paper it can all sound very deep and artistic, whether it be Ryu’s subversion of glorified fight sequences (characters sloppily attempt cinematic jump-kicks inspired by Bruce Lee and Street Fighter; shaky handheld shots make the action realistic by rendering it barely comprehensible) or the tight plotting with those familiar genre scenes that effectively convey a sense of tragic inevitability (or predictability). On screen, however, it isn’t particularly entertaining or compelling. There are directors who subvert genre cliches and employ minimalism to tell an effective story (Takeshi Kitano and Park Chan-wook, I’m looking at you!), but Ryu Seung-wan does not have it fully figured out here.
Still, that’s not to say Die Bad doesn’t have its fair share of bright spots. The climaxes of the first and final shorts have beautiful twists of expectations and the third short is brilliantly structured––ironically cutting between two opposing characters giving mockumentary interviews about their jobs and the exhausting, never-ending fight they have when they actually meet. Ryu’s cinema verite talents clearly show promise, from the cast’s naturalistic performances and dialogue to the precise visual rhythms of the film’s confining long takes and frenzied cutting. It’s almost to say he should make documentaries–– almost being the key word there because I’d never actually watch them.
It would also be a terrible thing to wish that on him because it’s obvious that Ryu isn’t content or disciplined enough to stick with that one style as Die Bad proves. He simply cannot resist depicting some pivotal scenes as ridiculous, unabashedly cinematic moments, which turns the film as a whole into a bit of a mess. At times, you’re almost ready to believe you’re watching real people doing real things until there’s a jarring scene of macho bravado with a character dramatically screaming to themselves, a lingering shot of gruesome violence to elicit a shock or a lazy genre cliche to further the story. We know that with his later films, Ryu will do a better job at partitioning the excessiveness, sky-screaming and embrace of cliches to one type of film (Arahan, City of Violence, Dachimawa Lee) and finding the power of restraint and realism in another type (Crying Fist, The Unjust), so Die Bad best stands as a work with glimmers of greater things to come. You’ll come away from the film having witnessed an excessive number of bloody mouths––images sometimes too cinematic to be taken seriously and other times too serious to be delightful––but despite the bloody mouths, it’ll feel beneficial in the long run. Just like going to the dentist.
Reviewed by Tarun
