Caminhos do Crime

Since I have not heard about this film before it was broadcast on the Sundance Channel, I had no expectations. This is a very good to almost excellent film about gangster life in South Korea. It features In-sung Zo in a terrific performance as low level gangster Byong-doo. He meets up with an old friend Min-ho, who is a filmmaker and picks Byong-doo's brains about being a gangster. It spirals from there, as Byong-doo gets more ruthless and violent in his quest for more money and especially power. He also meets up with another old classmate. the pretty Hyun-joo (Bo-yong Lee) and that relationship develops slowly. There is some violence in this, but if you like gangster films I liked this as much as Goodfellas. Really, it is that absorbing and highly recommended.

I'd heard a lot about this film, so I was a little surprised by the overall tone, which I felt wasn't very realistic.

The film follows a sub-commander-type gangster who starves under his immediate superior whilst he looks for the opportunity to prove the worth of himself and his men, as well as keep his actual family with a roof over their heads. That opportunity eventually arrives, but it leads to mistrust and dog learns to eat dog, which is about all I can say without ruining the plot.

A lot of users here have commented on the acting being great - and it really is! The fights are excellent (even though most men would be dead if hit with a baseball bat repeatedly to their unprotected chest - NOT a spoiler), and the flow of the story comes naturally. Wow, what's not to love, right?

Unfortunately, the film just cannot decide if it's a fanciful drama glamorising gangsters or a serious characterisation. The romance between the beautiful childhood friend and the lead lacks any kind of spark and it's not until the gangsters are scaring normal people out of their homes for the sake of their boss' stake in a housing development project that we realise they are actually supposed to be nasty people, which, until then, only seemed to be their opposition.

Overall then, A Dirty Carnival is an enjoyable enough flick, but there are better gangster films in both the Asian and Western world and given that the director couldn't seem to decide in what light to make the film, it's impossible to rate it any higher.

We got to see "A Dirty Carnival" at the Asian-American Film Festival here in San Francisco last week. The movie is truly amazing. The action sequences, the music, and the acting were all fantastic.

I think In-Seong Jo (lead actor) will have a very long career in movies. He'd be perfect for Hollywood movies too. His performance in this role lead me to do some research on his other movies - I'll be renting/buying them soon.

Hopefully, Hollywood will not try to re-make this film. It's perfect as is. American audiences are just going to have to get used to reading subtitles to see great movies.

A tale of betrayal & motivation in the Korean mob life, A Dirty Carnival concerns a 29-year old gangster working for a middle-rank enforcer whose rise begins after he takes up a job that earns him the big boss' trust & eliminates his boss to take up his position instead. But the real trouble begins when his friend, an aspiring filmmaker, asks him to be a consultant for his debut features which brings forth the events that were buried long ago.

There isn't much to complain in most of the film's aspects as everything is carried out pretty well be it the direction, screenplay, cinematography, editing or performances but the one thing I admire most about it is the action choreography for it puts on screen an impressive example of street fighting in the opening moments only & repeats itself at regular intervals throughout the film plus it's amazingly well accompanied by its electronic score.

On an overall scale, A Dirty Carnival presents a really fine effort from its cast & crew to come out as a nicely crafted crime-drama but it's also missing that X-factor that elevates a film like this to a level of greatness & the sum of the parts don't add up as well as I would've liked it to. Still, A Dirty Carnival works in many ways & steadily captures the zero tolerance principle of Korean mob life. Recommended for fans of Asian cinema.

Having a main character that is not the most loveable is one thing. Making him still not despicable and kind of relatable is another thing alltogether. South Korean crime movies and movies in general have been delivering and in 2020 Hollywood took a bow (even if Parasite is not crime and difficult to categorize, it is a superior movie to many others that have been released).

This is more predictable than that, but even so the path we take, the things we experience, even the ones we see coming are quite something. A lot of violence and almost a film school theme to the whole movie too. Know your stuff, know your story, don't just come up with stuff. Makes it all more authentic.

The ending might turn some off, but there's always danger in how to end and how people will feel about that, no matter if you're positive, negative or neutral about it. I would say the only way this could end - and the movie does not overexplain which is really good. This is a treat and I almost regret taking so long - before I finally watched it