Ryu Seung-wan valiantly follows the 2004 action-comedy hit Arahan with a highly anticipated, boxing character drama Crying Fist—a stirring blend of his earlier, gritty low-budget work and his recent commercial genre pics. Sporting two fantastic lead performances, a solid, steady script and an explosive climax, the film is a fascinating—though not by any means perfect—exploration and subversion of the underdog themed sports film by pitting two underdogs, equally developed characters, at odds with each other for a final, decisive bout.
Gang Tae-shik is a 43-year old, former Olympic boxing silver medalist, now down on his luck with debts owed to gangsters, no steady job, a fading memory, waning brain capacity and a downhill relationship with his ashamed child and wife, who wants a divorce. He lives in a run down house and makes ends meet by selling himself on the street as a human punching bag.
Yoo Sang-hwan is in his early twenties, living the life of a dread-locked low-class thug, beating people up, desperately stealing money to pay back his debts, and hardly appreciating his family’s support. When he is arrested after attacking a man, he is sentenced to five years in prison, and he displays his poor anger management skills by attacking another prisoner on the first day. In order to curb his violent side, the guards enroll him in the prison’s boxing program and Sang-hwan soon takes it up to repent for his sins through the sport.
The two boxers learn of a lightweight amateur boxing tournament and see it as an escape from their currently pitiful lives, but alas, there can only be one winner at the end.
While the story sticks to a fairly familiar direction, Ryu grants it an unhurried, perhaps tiresome pace that develops the parallel stories of our two protagonists and accomplishes the one vital goal of the first two acts: acquaint the characters with the audience.
Choi Min-sik dives headfirst into the character, giving the performance we expect and essentially becoming Tae-shik to his core. Ryu’s brother Ryu Seung-beom undergoes a more astonishing transformation from the whiny lead in Arahan to this sneering, seething juvenile delinquent who cares for nothing. The film dedicates the time—though too much of it—to giving a sympathetic look at the characters while also displaying their good and bad sides without any contrived plot turns.
But the film’s most significant problem rests in its main appeal: Ryu’s ambitious goal of pitting two sympathetic characters against each other, and wrenching our loyalties and wishes about as we struggle to choose who to support. Perhaps some viewers might find he succeeded, but it’s difficult to ignore how one character’s scripted circumstances always seem to make him more deserving of the victory. On paper, the character has much more to lose than the other, and in effect, tilts the scales and our sympathies in his direction. The ending can even be guessed from the uneven treatment.
Still, this hardly breaks the film especially when the finale rouses the viewer with a burst of intense moments, claustrophobia and immersive visuals characteristic of all the film’s boxing scenes. Ryu captures these scenes perfectly, placing the viewer in the middle of a flurry of punches and holds, but without any incomprehensible close-up cuts that hinder our view of the fight. Ryu shoots a particular round entirely in one take with a rotating camera that never lets up until the bell rings. The visuals of the entire film are strong, setting an unforgiving mood with cold shots of the city and the prison—locations apathetic to the plights of the main characters.
Though Crying Fist is not a perfect film, it solidifies Ryu Seung-wan as one of Korea’s strongest contemporary directors. Fans hoping for another stylish action film may be disappointed to wait for another film, but this pic nonetheless proves his talent and versatility to tackle whatever he may be in the mood for next.
Reviewed by Tarun
