The Manchurian fields of the 1930s. Bounty hunter Park Do-won (Jung Woo-sung), brutal villain Park Chang-yi (Lee Byung-hun), and quirky but persistent thief Yoon Tae-goo (Song Kang-ho) are in hot pursuit of an ancient treasure whose secrets lie in a hidden map. The finale is a huge shootout in the desert between the Japanese military, Manchurian bandits, and the three protagonists of the film, a dramatic conflict that blends the chaotic landscape of colonialism and resistance with the pleasure of entertainment.

This genre experiment, which directors a ‘Manchurian Western,’ is a modern combination of the ‘spaghetti Western’ with the existing genre of Korean film that explores themes of liberation in Manchuria. In the year of its release, The Good, the Bad, the Weird was invited to the non-competing section of the Cannes Film Festival, and it was a box-office success that attracted 6.7 million domestic viewers. It is a film that clearly illustrates what becomes possible when large-scale dramatic spectacle merges with the Korean historical stage, and even when revisited 80 years after Korean liberation, its light does not fade a bit.

Park Se-ho