ROUGH CUT (Korea, 2008)
Directed by: Hun Jang
Starring: Hong Su-Hyeon, Kang Ji-Hwan, Ko Chang-Seok, So Ji-Seob

Under-promising and over-delivering, this action blockbuster feels like a summer hit from Steven Soderbergh instead of Steven Spielberg. Korea’s bad boy arthouse provocateur, Kim Ki-Duk, produced and wrote the screenplay and this movie was a surprise hit when it was released. It’s easy to see why. ROUGH CUT is a surprisingly tense, thankfully cliche-free big budget entertainer that is far more than the sum of its parts. Thanks to director Hun Jang’s fascination with his actors, and his laser-like attention to their faces, every flicker of emotion in this flick comes at you as strong as a fist coming at your face and what we wind up with is brainy crowdpleaser with plenty of action.

Su-Tae (Kang Ji-Hwan) is a spoiled celebrity best known for playing a gangster onscreen and being a bad boy off. Upstaged by a co-star, he loses his cool and beats the poor thespian to within an inch of his life, sparking a media scandal. But what comes next is worse: no one wants to take the now-vacant part and what Su-Tae thought would be a simple, B-grade gangster movie that would earn him some quick cash threatens to become a career-ender for him. In desperation he turns to Gang-Pae (So Ji-Seob) an ice cold gangster who humiliated him in a nightclub one drunken evening and who happens to be his number one fan. Begging, cajoling and pleading, he gets Gang-Pae to agree to appear in his movie.

The problem is that with these two dudes hopped up on testosterone and locked on a film set together, there will be blood. Never before has the ancient death sport of male jousting been so meticulously chronicled. The script by Kim Ki-Duk keeps viewers guessing with one twist after another, but the movie belongs to So Ji-Seob. Best known for his TV work, here he plays a stone-faced killer whose charisma is spiked with sudden violence and whose signature scent is “Rutting Badass Stud.” Su-Tae and Gang-Pae turn the movie set into a battlefield and when the combat begins we not only get a glimpse behind the scenes of the Korean movie industry but we also learn that when you’re talking about the rocket-crotched alpha dog leading man on a movie set...there can be only one!