The Good, The Bad, The Weird (2008)

My plans for today were to go see The Adjustment Bureau, but all that changed when our 10:10pm show turned out to be sold out! In a sudden realization that I was on the verge of failing my "see a new movie everyday" new years resolution, we raced back to my bud's place and threw on a movie nearly at random. The movie I grabbed of the shelf was The Good, The Bad, The Weird. This immediately caught my attention of course since I started this whole experiment with the whole "man with no name" series. Jumping into this movie, I expected it to be either a near total rip off, or heavily inspired in the story and situations of The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly. Hit the jump to see if it was any of these things or something else.


As soon as the movie starts, I could tell it wasn't going to be a total rip off. Without boring you with all the small details, the movie starts off with a train robbery in which our 3 main characters first encounter each other over the matter of a treasure map. Of course none of them knows it's a treasure map just yet, but they all want it for one reason or another.

It does share some similarities to the Sergio Leone film, but not many. Basically just the 3 main characters and the fact that there's a treasure are the only big similarities. Any thing else I either didn't notice, or just isn't that big of a deal. Well, there's also an interesting similarity with the ending, but again it wasn't totally the same. Overall it still felt new enough that it stayed solidly in the homage zone and never felt like a rip-off.

I really liked the actors and characters they played. I liked the spin they put on "The Weird" bandit's character story. "The Bad" was really quite evil and a brutal killer with guns or knives. He also had quite the large gang of men on his side, many of them standing out as unique side characters, like the huge dude with the sledgehammer. "The Good" was possibly the one who was lacking in character development the most. The story actually follows "The Weird" most of the time and really develops him the most throughout the movie.

The action in this movie was also really fun. Lots of gun fights and The Weird often added a fun comedic element that is quite common in Korean movies. There were also a number of "on the run" action sequences where The Weird was running for his life and shots always hitting things all around him as he ducks and dodges around and underthings. I really liked these even if they weren't terribly long.

One last thing that stood out was the great music. In particular in a HUGE chase scene towards the end there was some absolutely great. It was really long, and even tied into the action that was going on onscreen.

I think this was a really good fun film with some cool action and good characters. It's always hard to tell exactly how good the actual quality of the acting is in a foreign film, but it seemed good to me. I say check it out for a fun alternative.