A Bittersweet Life (18) |Home Ents Review
Cast: Lee Byung-hun, Shin Min-a, Kim Yeong-cheol, Hwang Jung-min, Kim Roe-ha
Review by Colin Dibben
Sun-woo (Lee, Squid Games) is the young, righthand man to crime boss Mr Kang (Kim). Kang asks Sun-woo to keep tabs on his girlfriend Hee-soo (Shin) while Kang is abroad. When Sun-woo fails to punish Hee-soo for having another lover, Kang subjects him to a brutal beating and ejects him from his gang. Despite their strongly hierarchical relationship, Sun-woo sets out to get revenge on Kang, leading to a prolonged, body-strewn climax.
Multi-award-winning director Kim Jee-woon’s (The Good, The Bad, The Weird, I Saw The Devil) ultra-violent Korean neo-noir has become something of a benchmark for Korean crime films. It does still look great, like classic John Woo crossed with Wong Kar Wai, and there’s almost as much martial arts on display as gunplay. The film manages to create sympathy for Sun-woo, even though he is a bit of a jobsworth cipher; and every time your patience with him as a character wears out, there’s punching, kicking, shooting and knifing to keep your attention!
The extras take an extraordinarily deep look into the film. The most interesting is a contemporary featurette that looks at the film’s production design from several viewpoints. There is even an armourer’s section which focuses on the Soviet era automatic handgun that features heavily in the second half of the film.
A Bittersweet Life is out in a Limited Edition Dual 4K UHD and Blu-ray release on 22 July 2024, from Second Sight Films.
