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The young action-meister Ryu Seung-wan's third feature film following the searing Die Bad and snazzy No Blood No Tears was one of the most highly anticipated films of 2004. In a reversal of the fortune that greeted No Blood No Tears, overwhelmingly supported by critics but ignored by the audience, Arahan was a relative commercial success at around 2 million tickets sold domestically, but drew mixed reviews. Some critics were obviously disappointed to find in Arahan an unabashedly commercial film operating within the perimeters of the Asian action genre, minus the spurts of dark, realistic violence and artistic temperament in his previous works.

Sanghwan (Ryu Seung-beom, Conduct Zero, No Comment) is an earnest but scared-y-cat traffic cop, abused left and right by low-rent thugs. He gets accidentally embroiled in the lives of the Seven Masters, the secret guardians of justice, whose leader Ja-un (An Sung-ki, Nowhere to Hide, Musa, Silmido) suspects that Sanghwan has a potential to become Maruchi, an enlightened master of martial arts. Sanghwan, to the annoyance of Ja-un's tomboy daughter Eui-jin (newcomer Yoon So-yi), agrees to be trained in martial arts. The plot thickens when the workers at an excavation site accidentally releases the renegade Master Heug-un (Jeong Doo-hong). Can Sanghwan and Eui-jin attain the status of Maruchi and Arachi in time to defend the city of Seoul against Heug-un?

The best way to approach Arahan is to consider it as a shrewd hybrid of the updated kung-fu wire action extravaganza and a modern superhero comic adaptation, a mutation of Steve Chau's Shaolin Soccer by way of Sam Raimi's Spider-Man. It is readily identifiable as a labor of love by a filmmaker deeply immersed in the tradition of Hong Kong kung-fu cinema, especially the early films of Jackie Chan. The film has so thoroughly digested this tradition that the homages to Chan, Yuen Woo-ping and other past masters of Hong Kong cinema may not be readily spotted. But it's there when Ryu Seung-beom smashes a thrown chair in mid-air with a jump-kick, as (the Korean expatriate) Hwang Cheng-li did in the original Drunken Master. It's there when the camera licks the length of the sword that penetrates a character, as in The Eighteen Bronzemen of Shaolin. It's there in the way Sang-hwan "rides" a wooden plank like a skateboard, flashing a devil-may-care, Jackie-Chan-right-before-he-trusses-his-opponent smile.

At the same time Arahan comes with colors and sensibilities uniquely Korean, whether it is the film's clever premise that ordinary working class "craftsmen" are in fact secret masters of martial arts, or the mollifying comic performances that taste warm and hometown like a good 'ol bean paste stew Director Ryu draws out of the film's senior supporting cast. Arahan does not feel like a hodgepodge of Hong Kong film references at all (as it would have been in the hands of a lesser talent) but like a contemporary descendant of the (counter-factual) cross-breeding between Hong Kong and Korean action cinema in the '70s that should have taken place in reality but did not, a few exceptions like Jeong Chang-hwa's Five Fingers of Death notwithstanding.

Ryu Seung-beom has star charisma to spare, but for me it is his attention to little naturalistic details that marks him out, as in his uproarious expression of slow burn when a hapless thug hits him with a chair. His counterpart Yoon So-yi is tall and attractive in an excellently non-cutesy way. As expected, the great An Sung-ki anchors the film with his rock-steady presence but he also totally surprises the viewers with both amazing wire-action moves and wonderfully deadpan comic timing. He is far more interesting as an actor in this slightly goofy role than in Silmido. Jeong Doo-hong once again delivers a solid supporting performance and coordinates the project's insanely complex martial arts moves and wire action. Special mention must also be made of the art direction team led by Jang Keun-yeong and Kim Kyung-hee, responsible for the impressive hangar-size set of the Yongsan altar, cinematography by Lee Joon-gyu and the special effects supervised by Demolition, among others. Except for the scenes obviously modeled after Shaolin Soccer, Arahan's CGI effects are pretty distinctive from both Hollywood and Asian patterns. As was the case with Conduct Zero, the Arahan team's effort to selectively use the technology to generate unique aesthetic effects is laudable, even if a few rough edges still remain.

There have been some criticisms centered on the drawn-out, exhausting climactic fight sequence. I do agree that the overuse of slow motion as well as too many shots of the younger Ryu and Jeong roaring like lions with mouths hanging break up the rhythm of the climactic fight, but I believe that Director Ryu had to work the desire to surpass Yuen Woo-ping or Cheng Hsiu-tung out of his system one way or another. If anything, he seems to err on the side of passion and commitment rather than calculation. For me it was interesting to see, even in this sequence, Ryu Seung-wan's Cinema of Pain struggling to burst out like a geyser of blood from a character's mouth.

Despite its admittedly self-contradictory qualities, Arahan is the most fun I have had with a 2004 Korean film so far (early September). It is deceptively experimental like Ryu's other works and signals a step forward toward the development of Korean genre cinema.      (Kyu Hyun  Kim)

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