Janggunui adeul (1990)

Director:

Kwon-taek Im

Writers:

Song-yu Hong (novel)
Sam-yuk Yoon (writer)

Release Date:

9 June 1990 (South Korea)

Genre:

Action | Crime | Drama

Plot Keywords:

Based On Novel

Cast

Sang-min Park	...	Kim Doo-han
Hyeon-jun Shin	...	Hayashi
Il-jae Lee
Eun-hee Bang
Hyeong-il Kim
rest of cast listed alphabetically:
Jeong-min Hwang
Doo-hong Jung

Also Known As:

General's Son (International: English title)
Son of the General

Runtime:

108 min

Country:

South Korea

Language:

Japanese | Korean

Color:

Color

Sound Mix:

Stereo

Certification:

South Korea:15

Company:

Taehung Pictures

Movie Connections:

Followed by Janggunui adeul II (1991)

Punching, kicking, gangsters and nationalism

In addition to art-house cinema, director Im Kwontaek has a long history of making more commercial fare, perhaps the most popular of which is General's Son, a action-drama hybrid that features a lot of bare knuckle fights as we follow the story of a young man's ascent through the ranks of a Corean gang during the Japanese occupation.

Basically, a tramp with a knack for beating up people who seem tougher than him, finds himself useful in a gang. As he helps his various bosses as right-hand muscle, he finds himself continually elevated in the gang. Tension is achieved by the pressure of a police-backed Yakuza group that threatens to take control of the Corean underworld. While there seems to be some attempt to get into the characters, so much of the film is spent with nationalist messages (and some non-committal anti-Japanese sentiment), especially how the underworld is somehow the "last homefront" of resistance to the occupiers, that outside of the nationalist flag-waving, the story mostly just serves to act as the glue that pulls together a series of fight scenes that show just how much of a total badass that the protagonist Kim Doohan is.

Unsurprisingly, this formula worked exceptionally well with the Corean public leading to a pair of sequels and enough money and repute for the director that he would be able to take on more interesting projects later. Now, the storytelling has a lot of problems even outside of the cardboard-like story itself, including dropping characters in and out without expectation, a near-pointless romance thread (which I assume is just to bring in some sex to the pic), as well as an inability to focus while telling a linear story.

But, the film does show a keen eye to aesthetic detail and while it can get a little amateur seeming at times (especially the rather obvious use of softening lenses), framing and setting up of action sequences in particular are quite strong. Which is one thing the film does fairly well: fight scenes. Which is good since the film almost lives and dies by its fight scenes. Granted, these fights are a little unbelievable since our protagonist seems to be nigh invincible, but somehow still manage to be fun as the stakes get raised after each fight.

This doesn't save the movie entirely, but does spare it from being merely a flag-waving bore-fest that other more recent Corean films have claimed the title of. But don't go into this film expecting anything more than a bit of a B-flick stringing together some surprisingly engaging fight scenes. If that's what you go looking for, then you might just find enough here to pass the time. 6/10.