Kick The Moon (2001) DVD

Riding high on the goodwill he had created with his cult anarchic crime caper Attack the Gas Station! (1999), Kim Sang-jin turned his attention to a schizophrenic contradiction in the psyche of the Korean male. Framed as a comic buddy pic, his 2001 film Kick The Moon (or Shinlaui Dalbam) shows two apparently opposite personality types – the one thuggishly violent, the other studiously calculating – constantly in interchange with one another.

Dualism abounds in Kick The Moon, with its two principal characters, its two time periods, its parallel scenes and mirrored motifs. Twenty years ago, while a class of Seoul school pupils was on a trip in Gyeongju, two of them had their lives redefined by the massive, now legendary street fight that took place there. After leading his fellow students in the brawl, popular tough guy Choi Gi-dong (Cha Seung-won) stayed in Gyeongju, turned his back on gangsterism, and has now become a teacher at the very school whose students he once combated. Park Young-joon (Lee Jung-gae), then an upright bookish nerd and the only pupil in his class to miss out on the rumble, has since risen through Mafia ranks to become suave strategist for a major crime syndicate.

Having effectively swapped roles, these two men are reunited in Gyeongju when Young-joon returns to oversee the takeover of a local casino – and they will soon be doing battle again, both alongside and against each other, as their shared love for spunky noodlebar owner Ju-ran (Kim Hae-su) brings out their dormant sense of rivalry – and friendship.

While some may welcome the news that Kick the Moon is far less mean-spirited than other Asian films concerned with the twisted legacy of school bullying and aggression (see: Ichi the Killer; Oldboy; Neighbour No. 13; The City of Violence; and A Bloody Aria), the downside is the film’s tendency to indulge in inappropriate sentiment (typified by Son Mu-hyeon’s excruciatingly mawkish soundtrack) and to make light of inherently serious issues. Or is Kim just satirising Korea’s long, paradox-riddled love affair with violence?

Anton Bitel