[KFCC] Beat Review

Story: Min is always getting into trouble with his best friend Tae-Su, they are often getting into gang fights. Tae-Su finds a job in the world of organized crime but Min declines saying his mother wishes he would get an education. After Min enrolled into a new school he befriended Hwan another trouble maker. One night at a local club Min gets auctioned off to a girl (Romy) to be slave for a night. He falls in love with Romy and continues to see her but she keeps the distance between them because she is concentrating on her education to get into college. As time goes by Tae-Su ends up in prison, Romy disappears, and Min and Hwan open a small restaurant. Tae-Su dreams of becoming a respected mob boss once he leaves prison, Romy is driven insane by an accident and gives up on her education, Hwan hopes to have a big restaurant someday and Min just keeps waiting for Romy to call him.

Review: This movie is more of a drama than action, it tells the story of 4 people and their lives. The movie won the Prize Technology and New Actor award at the 34th Baek Sang Art Award, we do not know if this movie is classified as an art movie but we think maybe it should be. The idea for this movie originates from a popular comic book series. The story is very much generation X as in living on the edge with no hope and faded dream. It is about friendship and about love and what both of these things mean to the characters. It is also a sad story because life is not as easy as you expect it to be and often enough your dreams will not come true. The story is somewhat complicated and very involving in the lives of the characters.

There were very few characters outside the 4 main in the movie. The story is basically about the development of this 4 characters and how their lives cross each others. There is a certain evolution of the characters from start to finish, they will not be the same from when you first see them and when you last see them. Also you will see the characters having to make difficult choices between love and friendship. It is hard to review the aspect of the characters in this movie because there are so much and it is complicated. You might also find it hard to understand the motivations of the characters sometimes but deep down in the movie all the info is there. Simply said this is a deep movie when it comes to the characters and their lives, also for this reason some people might not like the characters or the choices they will make. I could write several chapters on each of the characters but I leave it up to you to see the movie.

Don't worry this movie is not all talk and drama, while dealing with all these issues the characters will and do get into fights. With the theme of organized crime you can expect similar style of fights to Hong Kong Triad movies, street gangs running around with knives and bats. There is quite a few fights during the movie but there is one thing that we did not like about them. In every fight scene you have the blurred camera motion, kind of like in some scenes of Young and Dangerous I. At first it is ok but after awhile it gets annoying because all the fights seem very confusing and you don't really see the nice moves very clearly. We can understand the directors idea of generating the confusing in big fights that you would normally have in real life and it was also an attempt to recreate the feeling from the comic book but we find it was overdone.

The subtitles were great of the Korean DVD, but unfortunately all the menus are written in Korean. This was a difficult film to review because we all had different opinions, not all of us liked the movie. We tried to keep the review neutral by pointing out both the negative aspects and positive aspects of the movie. This tells a little about the film, unlike most of our movies this one is not simple entertainment. The creator of the movie had something on his mind when he made this film, he had something to say. Because of this reason there are many of you that will either like or find it boring but either way we cannot deny the fact that a lot of time and thought was put in the creation of the movie. We are not sure who would enjoy this movie but if you like a movie with a lot of characters with issues in their lives and the theme of the no hope generation X, then perhaps you will find this movie interesting. As for anyone seeking pure entertainment, action or a movie to simply enjoy we suggest you think twice about the movie.