No. 3 (1997) DVD

Near the beginning of No. 3, Tae-ju (Han Suk-kyu) describes how a swan that appears to glide gracefully through the water is in fact, below the surface, all flailing legs and awkward effort. It is an apt description of the action seen in Song Neun-han’s 1997 gangster comedy, as Tae-ju’s bid to rise through the ranks exposes everyone’s shabby banality, from the lowest street thug to the No. 1 boss.

By opting to stay loyal to his incapacitated boss during an attempted coup, Tae-ju finds himself promoted to right-hand man, only to realise that he is sharing this lieutenancy with the boorish Ashtray (Park Sang-myeon), so-named for his preferred murder weapon. Meanwhile, he must contend with a bargirl-turned-wife (Lee Mi-yeon) who wants to become a poet; with a tough prosecutor (Choi Min-sik) who will stop at nothing to bring the gang down; and with an incompetent hitman (Song Kang-ho) hungry to make his own mark.

“The world really is filled with gangsters,” declares prosecutor Dong-pal, and indeed Song is satirising the number-crunching hierarchies of politicians and businessmen as much as of criminals – not that the alternative perspective of poets comes off looking any less ridiculously self-important in this clash of Rambo and Rimbaud. Unfortunately, however, all  the Tarantino-esque chaos of plot and subplot undercuts itself with such determined bathos that the viewer is more alienated than engaged, and Song’s bag of stylistic tics has a similar effect (especially on non-Korean viewers for whom apparently comic captions have been left untranslated), while several scenes (the playground fight, for instance) are simply too long for what they have to say. In the end, though good-humoured, this film, unlike a swan, fails to conceal its own ungainliness.

Anton Bitel