Turtle Stomper
Seattle (USA)
This review may contain spoilers
An extravagance of fast paced visually appealing action
Whelp...I watched this cause I'm a fan of the lead actor, especially in action dramas, he puts so much emotion into most of his roles and he's a total hottie. I really didn't expect much more than some late night eye candy, but this Movie definitely did not disappoint. This movie combines the "gamer friends meet up IRL to battle bad guys" theme with the "wrongly accused and fight to prove your innocence" theme. To be fair, I'm probably predisposed to liking this movie because I'm a gamer chick and anything where gamers kick ass is a 10 in my book (plus, let's be honest, I'd really like to think the dudes on the other end of my Discord calls are as hot as Ji Chang-Wook).
The movie itself is a fire hose of action and splashy high-tech concepts all sort of projectile vomited at you while Ji Chang-Wook sprints and spins across your screen. The lead antagonist is essentially a serial killer whose turned his passion into his occupation. At first, I wasn't sold on the actor choice for the bad guy or his acting, but as the movie progressed I ended up 100% on board with hating his rotten guts. Dude has an outburst at one point where he's so excited and pissed off at the same time that he's literally drooling on himself while he grins and flops his inept body around a kitchenette. He looked legitimately evil and I was pretty impressed by his performance from that point on.
The biggest downside to this movie is that it tries to do SO MUCH in such a small amount of time (vs a 16 hour drama setting). So whereas in a drama like Vincenzo you'd see them pull off crazy shit and then they'd backtrack to show you the setup, in this much shorter platform they've basically kept the "pull off crazy shit" and just not bothered with the how of it all. That leads to some pretty sizeable plot holes where you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit. But then...it doesn't seem like they were really going for in-depth cerebral mind blast so much as pure action badassery.
One scene I really enjoyed was a fight scene in a pitch dark room between the hero and a group of bad guys. He cuts the lights and throws grains of rice to hear from the sound where the bad guys are. The way they've depicted that scene is pretty cool, the sounds are represented by sort of splashing paint on objects in an fluorescent aqua light. It was pretty well done and looked incredibly sick. I appreciated the typical Korean storytelling mastery of taking an innocent seeming object (in the case the rice) and planting it earlier in the movie with an innocuous scene and then tying it back in as a key plot point later on.
Overall I'd give it a pretty high rating as a fast paced action with extravagant fight/car/tech scenes. I'd for sure rewatch it, but mostly because the lead actor is legit badass.
The movie itself is a fire hose of action and splashy high-tech concepts all sort of projectile vomited at you while Ji Chang-Wook sprints and spins across your screen. The lead antagonist is essentially a serial killer whose turned his passion into his occupation. At first, I wasn't sold on the actor choice for the bad guy or his acting, but as the movie progressed I ended up 100% on board with hating his rotten guts. Dude has an outburst at one point where he's so excited and pissed off at the same time that he's literally drooling on himself while he grins and flops his inept body around a kitchenette. He looked legitimately evil and I was pretty impressed by his performance from that point on.
The biggest downside to this movie is that it tries to do SO MUCH in such a small amount of time (vs a 16 hour drama setting). So whereas in a drama like Vincenzo you'd see them pull off crazy shit and then they'd backtrack to show you the setup, in this much shorter platform they've basically kept the "pull off crazy shit" and just not bothered with the how of it all. That leads to some pretty sizeable plot holes where you have to suspend your disbelief a little bit. But then...it doesn't seem like they were really going for in-depth cerebral mind blast so much as pure action badassery.
One scene I really enjoyed was a fight scene in a pitch dark room between the hero and a group of bad guys. He cuts the lights and throws grains of rice to hear from the sound where the bad guys are. The way they've depicted that scene is pretty cool, the sounds are represented by sort of splashing paint on objects in an fluorescent aqua light. It was pretty well done and looked incredibly sick. I appreciated the typical Korean storytelling mastery of taking an innocent seeming object (in the case the rice) and planting it earlier in the movie with an innocuous scene and then tying it back in as a key plot point later on.
Overall I'd give it a pretty high rating as a fast paced action with extravagant fight/car/tech scenes. I'd for sure rewatch it, but mostly because the lead actor is legit badass.
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