Opening Scenes Summary:
PSYCHOKINESIS (a South Korean movie I watched with English subtitles) opens with a local television station doing a human interest piece featuring a young woman running a small but very successful fried chicken restaurant (Korean-style fried chicken). That night, however, a score of men wearing construction hardhats break their way in to the closed restaurant and proceed to thoroughly trash it. The young woman struggles valiantly to stop them to no avail.
While the battle is ongoing, the young woman's mother drives up in a van and tries to help fend off the attackers but only succeeds in getting herself fatally injured, dying soon thereafter in surgery at the hospital. (For a description of what this battle was all about, please read the last paragraph of this review.)
Suddenly, in a following scene, we see a meteor streaking across the sky, a little boom, and then we see a little meteorite in its little crater. Something all sparkly-glowy comes flowing out of the meteorite, across the forest floor and into the water supply where it's immediately drunk by a late-middle-aged man as it comes out of the pipe at little drinking station in a forested hiking area. This late-middle-aged man is our hero.
Next we see our hero at his day job: a low ranking "security guard" (but mostly little more than a greeter) at a bank. He's definitely not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is prone to stealing office supplies for his own use, and leads one of his coworkers down that same primrose path and gets her into serious trouble.
Getting drunk that evening out of a sense of guilt, we see the first expression of his meteorite-induced psychokinetic powers as he drunkenly knocks around the outdoor tables that he's drinking at.
Soon, our hero gets a call from his daughter informing him that his ex-wife, her mother, has been killed. We eventually learn that the original divorce came about as an expression of practicality because our hero got himself badly into debt and wanted to disassociate his wife and daughter with the results of his bad choices. His daughter, however, the fried chicken girl, has never forgiven him for leaving them.
Review:
Somewhat typical of a lot of South Korean adventure or fantasy movies, PSYCHOKINESIS is a combination of slapstick comedy intermingled with drama and somewhat over-the-top violence. As such, it's a fairly good representative movie reflecting South Korean tastes and sensibilities. Lots of yelling, lots of exaggerated takes and double takes and a big, pull-out-all-the-stops, battle scene just before the end. Throughout, major plot points are often left unexplained; the viewer is expected to simply accept them and move on. The overall level of sophistication is roughly that of, say, SON OF FLUBBER circa 1963. (It should be noted, however, that I caught at least one instance of the F-bomb.)
None of this is to suggest that this is a bad movie or that you shouldn't give it a go. But do keep in mind that it's flavor is specifically spiced for its target audience (South Korea) and American audiences might have to adjust their tastebuds a little to enjoy it.
While I do get a little tired of all the yelling, I personally rather liked it. Lots of traditional family values, a family mending what fences they can, a dad learning that trying harder is almost always the best approach, a daughter learning that dad wasn't, perhaps, quite the giant jerk she thought he was, a morality comment that superheroes have to do time if they break the law, and so on. Simple, exceedingly unsophisticated, and generally doesn't try to jam some liberal/progressive message wrapped in a movie down the viewer's throat.
As a concluding observation, it should be noted that the core plot line centers around some of the social turmoil that has accompanied South Korean redevelopment conflicts in recent years. Like many industrialized nations, some of the poorer cross-sections of society end up renting both residences and commercial property in rundown neighborhoods in which to live and have their businesses. As property values skyrocket, it is often financially rewarding for property owners to repurpose/redevelop depressed areas. This has led to actual battles fought in the streets with police forces attempting to forcibly remove renters/squatters. Many of the individual scenes depicted in the final showdown battle comes straight from newspaper accounts of actual events.
PSYCHOKINESIS (a South Korean movie I watched with English subtitles) opens with a local television station doing a human interest piece featuring a young woman running a small but very successful fried chicken restaurant (Korean-style fried chicken). That night, however, a score of men wearing construction hardhats break their way in to the closed restaurant and proceed to thoroughly trash it. The young woman struggles valiantly to stop them to no avail.
While the battle is ongoing, the young woman's mother drives up in a van and tries to help fend off the attackers but only succeeds in getting herself fatally injured, dying soon thereafter in surgery at the hospital. (For a description of what this battle was all about, please read the last paragraph of this review.)
Suddenly, in a following scene, we see a meteor streaking across the sky, a little boom, and then we see a little meteorite in its little crater. Something all sparkly-glowy comes flowing out of the meteorite, across the forest floor and into the water supply where it's immediately drunk by a late-middle-aged man as it comes out of the pipe at little drinking station in a forested hiking area. This late-middle-aged man is our hero.
Next we see our hero at his day job: a low ranking "security guard" (but mostly little more than a greeter) at a bank. He's definitely not the sharpest knife in the drawer, is prone to stealing office supplies for his own use, and leads one of his coworkers down that same primrose path and gets her into serious trouble.
Getting drunk that evening out of a sense of guilt, we see the first expression of his meteorite-induced psychokinetic powers as he drunkenly knocks around the outdoor tables that he's drinking at.
Soon, our hero gets a call from his daughter informing him that his ex-wife, her mother, has been killed. We eventually learn that the original divorce came about as an expression of practicality because our hero got himself badly into debt and wanted to disassociate his wife and daughter with the results of his bad choices. His daughter, however, the fried chicken girl, has never forgiven him for leaving them.
Review:
Somewhat typical of a lot of South Korean adventure or fantasy movies, PSYCHOKINESIS is a combination of slapstick comedy intermingled with drama and somewhat over-the-top violence. As such, it's a fairly good representative movie reflecting South Korean tastes and sensibilities. Lots of yelling, lots of exaggerated takes and double takes and a big, pull-out-all-the-stops, battle scene just before the end. Throughout, major plot points are often left unexplained; the viewer is expected to simply accept them and move on. The overall level of sophistication is roughly that of, say, SON OF FLUBBER circa 1963. (It should be noted, however, that I caught at least one instance of the F-bomb.)
None of this is to suggest that this is a bad movie or that you shouldn't give it a go. But do keep in mind that it's flavor is specifically spiced for its target audience (South Korea) and American audiences might have to adjust their tastebuds a little to enjoy it.
While I do get a little tired of all the yelling, I personally rather liked it. Lots of traditional family values, a family mending what fences they can, a dad learning that trying harder is almost always the best approach, a daughter learning that dad wasn't, perhaps, quite the giant jerk she thought he was, a morality comment that superheroes have to do time if they break the law, and so on. Simple, exceedingly unsophisticated, and generally doesn't try to jam some liberal/progressive message wrapped in a movie down the viewer's throat.
As a concluding observation, it should be noted that the core plot line centers around some of the social turmoil that has accompanied South Korean redevelopment conflicts in recent years. Like many industrialized nations, some of the poorer cross-sections of society end up renting both residences and commercial property in rundown neighborhoods in which to live and have their businesses. As property values skyrocket, it is often financially rewarding for property owners to repurpose/redevelop depressed areas. This has led to actual battles fought in the streets with police forces attempting to forcibly remove renters/squatters. Many of the individual scenes depicted in the final showdown battle comes straight from newspaper accounts of actual events.