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Lee Byung-hun in A Bittersweet Life (2005)

User reviews

A Bittersweet Life

3 reviews
3/10

Nothing but cliché...

When you see so many good reviews,you ask yourself: hmm...did we see the same movie????!!! 'The best Korean movie ever', 'fantastic'... It can be that I watched some other movie???!!

This movie is totally predictable. From the start you know who will make the hell of life to our hero, you could see what kind of boss our hero has..., the task what he gets can be end up only in two ways... Everything has been seen so many times.

I must admit that this movie is real,close to the real life,it is not that the main character can beat 1000 guys with one kick,but..., who knows, maybe with some more fantastic fight scenes the movie would be more interesting. This way, you can predict almost the whole movie. The ones who consider this is the best Korean movie ever..., they obviously haven't seen enough Korean movies and their excellent cinematography.

The sum: a movie's goal is not to be totally unpredictable, always to give some new perspective, to have some great scenes..., but this one is nothing but a gangster cliché. To obey to your boss entirely, or not? It is so normal when somebody reaches the point when it is not so easy to obey 100%, the reason is not important.

Even the punch line: How did we get to this point and why? is not so impressive, because every 'why' has its reason. So, this movie can be depicted as NOT ENOUGH of anything which is important for a good movie (it doesn't matter if we seek for a deep movie, a good action or some other kind of movie).
  • drpavlovic1611
  • Mar 26, 2012
  • Permalink
3/10

Tedious and over-rated

This is simply another, yet another, case of the newspaper reviews and IMDb contributors way, way off the mark when it comes to a 'cult' movie. This film dragged on in a preposterous and unimaginative way with no real development of character, no poise or thorough art direction and certainly no depth.

Some initial signs pointed to a carefully thought out film, with the opening quotation and some stylishly modern interiors in the hotel. It was okay to look at. When I got bored I just watched the lead actress - about the only woman in the whole film. What I thought was going to develop into a study of internal anguish or the struggle among violent contemporaries to connect in a human way was shoved aside for guns, gore and torture of the most basic kind.

The photography had its moments, but contained nothing we haven't seen before. The violence was prolonged and lacking in any context or feeling. The lead character endured all manner of assaults and still kept going - he must've been running on Duracell. To top it all, the film contained some of the most blatant product placement since that other over-praised piece of dreck 'Night Watch'. Characters incessantly talked into their mobiles, entailing frequent close-ups focused not on the characters faces, but on their phones' logos.

Fans of Asian shoot-em-ups should pass this by and pick Infernal Affairs, Better Tomorrow, Gonin, Sonatine, Hana Bi, etc., etc., instead.
  • barryalanmarshall
  • May 17, 2006
  • Permalink
3/10

Feels Forced; Disappointing on Multiple Fronts

  • jtbswartz
  • Nov 23, 2021
  • Permalink

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