Review: Gang (2019)

Jo Bareun's Gang is one of the more obscure Korean films I’ve seen, and it definitely has something to do with its appearance as something of a student film. It’s charming in its shameless lack of depth, which reads very much like just something they wanted to make more than being a passion project—it’s fun for the sake of being fun. With a description like “bad boy gets transferred to Bad Boy School and fights all the other bad boys to become the baddest boy,” this obviously isn’t for everyone, but is it for me? Absolutely.

The story follows bad boy Choi Jihoon (Cha Jihyuk) as he gets transferred to the proclaimed "worst school in Korea"—which isn’t a school so much as it is literally just a fighting tournament (which rules)—and instantly begins his mission to become top dog. The only way to get there is to enter the school's official underground fight club, starting from the bottom and working his way to the top to dethrone the “baddest boy” of them all. This is one of the most anime live-action movies I’ve ever seen, and extremely straightforward. It’s an action-comedy and not a blessed thing more.

While Gang leaves something to be desired, it’s interesting in its crudeness, for lack of a better term. It doesn’t quite mock itself enough to be considered a true parody of this style of an action movie, not thought-through enough to feel like someone’s magnum opus, and its fight choreography doesn’t quite match up with the amount of love that goes into filming those sequences—shoot, not even one member of the cast of high school kids looks younger than 25. But all of it together makes for a good time if you want to see some goofin’ and punchin’ and kickin’.

Edited by Vivian N.