Kim Ji-woon‘s film is not a remake of The Good, The Bad And The Ugly, but there's more than a streak of Sergio Leone in this extraordinary South Korean action-adventure. An uptempo noodle western (the niftiest way to term Far Eastern spaghetti), The Good, The Bad, The Weird tips its hat to such classics as For A Few Dollars More and Once Upon A Time In The West with its near-namesake serving as the strongest influence.

Despite being derivative though, The Good, The Bad, The Weird is determined to do its own thing and strikes out as a unique, stylish feature in its own right. With enthusiastic verve, Kim Ji-woon reappropriates Western mythology and iconography to 1930s Manchuria and injects it with the raw energy and action sensibility that so strongly underpins Asian cinema. Just as mesmerising Thai horse melodrama Tears Of The Black Tiger took the all-American genre, lovingly turned it inside out and shook it up into a bizarre cultural hybrid, The Good, The Bad, The Weird does the same for South Korea. The result is spectacular.
Farewell