A spaghetti western with Eastern flavor

Here’s a 21st-century flick that likely flew under your radar: The Good, the Bad, the Weird, directed by Kim Jee-woon and released in 2008, a South Korean action-adventure film that reimagines Sergio Leone's classic spaghetti Western, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, by merging Western and Eastern cinematic styles. Set in 1930s Japanese-occupied Manchuria, the film centers on three characters: Park Do-won (The Good), a sharp-shooting bounty hunter; Park Chang-yi (The Bad), a merciless assassin; and Yoon Tae-goo (The Weird), an eccentric bandit. Each character races to secure a treasure map while being pursued by various adversaries.

This picture is distinguished by its creative genre blend and strong performances from its leads—Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun, and Jung Woo-sung—helping it develop a cult following and become one of South Korea's highest-grossing films in its year of release.

To listen to a recording of our CineVerse group discussion of this film, conducted last week, click here.

The Good the Bad and the Weird works as an affecting pastiche of several different styles, eras, and filmmaking sensibilities, mashing up Spaghetti Westerns with Manchurian action films and Tarantino-like postmodern meta movies that are chock full of references to previous films.

Propelled by a creative cultural fusion, the movie blends components from different film genres and cultural traditions. It’s a South Korean production influenced by Italian Spaghetti Westerns, yet set within the historical context of 1939 involving China and Korea, which at that time was controlled by Japan.

Be forewarned, however: It’s hardly period-authentic to 1939 Asia, abandoning realism or historical accuracy and instead favoring fantastical fun, visual exaggeration, and over-the-top set pieces. Yet the chase choreography, sheer number of impressive stunts, and epic scope—featuring dozens of actors and stuntmen on horseback and riding vintage vehicles—are awe-inspiring.

“Director Kim Ji-woon has fashioned a furious picture that blurs the lines of period authenticity, designing a punk western for Asian audiences that plays dress-up convincingly,” according to critic Brian Orndorf. “There's a bigness to the mayhem that's immensely pleasing, and Kim arranges rousing bouts of violence to give the tale a wonderfully threatening edge, which elevates the tension at hand…It's a frenzied action movie, strangely seriocomic piece, and large-scale theme park stunt show all rolled into one bizarre oater, riding an unexpectedly epic arc of heroism and villainy.”

It stays relatively faithful to the Leone masterpiece it borrows its title from, although the Good character of the trio isn’t as believably inhabited by this actor as Clint Eastwood did for the Man With No Name. Also, ponder how, as in The Good the Bad and the Ugly the Civil War was the backdrop of the conflict between the characters, the historical setting here is pre-World War II Manchuria, today known as Northeast China.

This is a picture that rewards post-credit watching. If you stick around past the supposed final shot of the gushing geyser, you learn that the Good has survived and is now chasing down the Weird, who has also outlived his adversaries.

While this film isn’t Hitchcockian, it employs a MacGuffin: the treasure map, which serves as a device that motivates the characters but is relatively insignificant to our understanding and enjoyment of the film.

Perhaps a flaw of the film is that the character motivations and backstories are blurry. In his negative review of the movie, Slant critic Simon Abrams wrote: “Not one of our protagonists’ motives remains consistent from start to finish, not even the Weird’s own amoral compass, in this case his lust for treasure. The only side these guys are on is their own, making the film a knowingly cacophonous exercise in futility.”

Prominent themes include the moral murkiness around identity and expected roles. This movie delves into the complexities of character, persona, and ethics. The Good is a bounty hunter, the Bad is a merciless assassin, and the Weird is an eccentric thief, yet their behaviors and motivations often blur the lines between these labels. Consider how the Good is mostly an amoral mercenary who kills a lot of people; the Weird possesses sympathetic qualities, has a grandmother, and rescues kids yet proves to be the violent and cruel “finger-chopper”; and the bad, by being the victim of the finger-chopper, perhaps isn’t as loathsome a villain as we would believe.

Avarice and ambition serve as both text and subtext here. The narrative is propelled by the quest for a treasure map, highlighting how the characters' desire and drive push them to take drastic measures. However, the futility of this greed, bloodshed, and conflict is underscored at the conclusion when we learn that there is no “treasure”—instead, X marks the spot of an untapped oil well that none of the three men could likely lay claim to.

The film also explores the notion of predetermined paths and themes of destiny and fate, with characters seemingly locked into roles that they cannot escape. Recall how the “Good” says that life for these characters boils down to either chasing or being chased, as if they cannot escape this fate, or their impulse to follow the treasure map.

Similar works

• The Man With No Name Trilogy, especially The Good the Bad and the Ugly
• The Mad Max films, which also feature spectacularly choreographed chase sequences
• Raiders of the Lost Ark, Ben-Hur, and Stagecoach, also famous for action and horse-riding stunts
• The Treasure of the Sierra Madre
• Hard Boiled by John Woo
• Manchurian action films

Other films by Kim Jee-woon

• The Quiet Family
• A Tale of Two Sisters
• I Saw the Devil
• The Age of Shadows
• Cobweb