Month: August 2007 (Page 2 of 2)

Okay, I was wrong about Shim Hyung-rae’s dragon tale D-WAR. It is not a guilty pleasure movie. It is not a movie for 10-year-olds. It is just plain old bad. Possibly — just possibly — amusing for university sophomore geeks who are really liquored up and/or burning through a garbage full of weed. But even for a mindless dork like myself, it was pretty brutal.

[Shudder…]

Fortunately for the producers and distributors, “good” is not a terribly important quality in getting people to go to the theaters. Exhibit A – HULK. Which, the more that I think about it, is an apt comparison. HULK was a lousy, lousy film, with bad CGI and a non-story. And Shim once starred in the not-so-classic film HYEONG-RAE AND THE HULK.

HULK pulled in $130 million or so at the US box office back in 2003, and D-WAR is apparently going to quite well, too (2.2 million admissions, as of Saturday night).

I assume I do not need to recount the plot at this point. It is widely known already… plus there is not much to recount. Big snake wants girl. TV news guy tries to keep girl from snake. There is much exposition. There are flashbacks. The flashbacks have flashbacks. Words like “Imoogi”, “Baruki” and “Yowijoo” get mentioned a lot, but no one laughs. Finally the special effects kick in.

More than the wooden acting and silly story, the entire film has an odd, through-a-prism feel to it. It looks like an American action/fantasy film on the surface, you can recognize all the bits and pieces… but it feels constantly unreal from start to finish. As if the whole film was out of focus (mentally/metaphorically, that is). It was like an abstraction of an abstraction.

As far as design goes, it totally looked like LORD OF THE RINGS meets CHINESE GHOST STORY.

The best part of D-WAR, hands down, was Craig Robinson (who plays Darryl in THE OFFICE). He must have re-written all his lines, because they are the only natural-sounding, believable lines in the whole film. He was even funny in parts.

Second-best part – it is barely 90 minutes long. Down from the 107 minute version Variety reviewed last November (although it felt even longer than PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 3: AT WORLD’S END).

Luckily, when I got home, I discovered that FOX-TV was showing a 16-hour BATTLESTAR GALACTICA marathon. A few episodes washed away the worst of the mental grime.

….

Against the odds, the expert predictions, and good sense, D-WAR looks like it is going to be a hit in Korea. The $32-million monster movie was released on Aug. 1 with a bang, and it is looking strong. D-WAR made about $2.8 million on Wednesday alone (417,000 admissions), then made another $3.3 million yesterday.

With such a good start, Showbox is now predicting D-WAR will pull in around 2-2.5 million admissions by the end of Sunday (up to $17 million). That’s like THE HOST and SPIDER-MAN 3 money. I don’t think anyone would have predicted an opening that good.

The question now is how well will it sustain. What will the word of mouth be? The story might be weak, but with the kids out of school now, things could be looking good for the creature feature.

And, really, why not? Giant dragons, monsters with rocket launchers attached… Sounds like the stuff of dreams, when I was back in my Lego days.