Suckers for Jeon Ji-Hyun, Kwak Jae-Yong and the schmaltz of an appealing romantic comedy should find themselves at home with this attempt to recreate the magic of My Sassy Girl. The film finds its footing in the most reliable ways, with the typical rom-com structure and charming leads giving the courtship moments an infectious joy. And while the film takes a typical turn into melodrama at the required point, Kwak slight alters the formula by throwing in a little of the supernatural and taking the film on a more difficult path. Windstruck definitely has fun and interesting ideas scattered about, but the odd juxtaposition of serious and comic moments, coupled with some desperate genre-mashing might make the film difficult for some viewers to digest as a whole.
Myung-woo, your average kindly citizen and physics teacher one day begins chasing a thief who steals a lady’s purse. While the woman screams for help, off-duty police officer Yeo Kyung-jin joins in the chase, mistaking Myung-woo for the thief and viciously arresting him in a humorous ordeal of identity problems, until matters get resolved and he’s finally let go without any apology. Myung-woo later volunteers for a program to discipline unruly kids on the streets, and his assigned cop partner ends up being the bossy Kyung-jin, who forcibly leads him to a dangerous drug bust by hand-cuffing him and giving him the ride of a lifetime. They wind up stuck together for a short period of time due to a missing key, and who knows, maybe they fall in love at that point. Is that how these things go?
Yes, and these are the scenes that viewers will love to sit through over and over ever since Kwak’s My Sassy Girl kick started the trend in Korea. The first hour is packed with humor, hitting high points with the stern, abusive Jeon Ji-hyun, essentially redressing her Sassy Girl role with an added bitterness that sporadically emerges. Jang Hyuk convincingly plays the typical lovable nice guy, but gets his moments to shine when he occasionally breaks away— at one point he sets into a sadistic mode and has a blast.
The problem is that neither Kwak, nor anyone else involved in this film could think of a good enough filler plot as an excuse for us to watch two pretty people fall in love. The audience is forced through awkward tonal shifts as the romantic comedy moments give way to Michael Bay type cop action scenes with a reckless Kyung-jin kicking criminal ass. Sure, an action movie can have romance, but it’s simply odd when the same film has one sweet moment where our two leads dance around in the rain to the oldies song ‘Stay,’ and then a gruesome murder scene soon thereafter. It recalls those script filler moments in My Sassy Girl when Cha Tae-hyun reads Jeon’s amateur screenplays and imagines the overlong movie sequences, however, without any of the irony.
When the second half of the film descends into melodrama, audiences should be pleased to find it convincing, emotional, and relatively unique. It has a distinctively different angle from the normally contrived plot turn that breaks the characters up so they can dramatically get back together again. Kwak takes a risk with a plot turn that does not allow a neat, predictable happy ending.
But again, this half comes with its share of problems when the film runs on for far too long, indulges in heavy-handed scenes and even makes its viewer sick of Jeon Ji-hyun’s frequent weeping. Kwak finds an absolutely perfect and satisfying way to end the film, but did we really have to wade through all the fat and unnecessary tangents to get there?
Reviewed by Tarun
