Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email

2013 February 08 • Friday

Mai Wei (My Way, 2011) is a well made war drama that seems to have only one very slender thread attaching it to a true story, despite its "based on a true story" claim.

Sohn Kee-Chung was a real person. When he competed in a marathon at the 1936 Berlin Olympics he became the first Korean ever to win a gold medal in an Olympic event. His story is interesting but My Way is not about him, though he has a cameo.

Sohn inspires Kim Jun-shik to train as a marathon runner and it's thanks to Sohn's intervention that Kim is allowed to run in a marathon with Japanese contenders, including his childhood rival Hasegawa Tatsuo.

Things don't go well and Kim ends up drafted into the Japanese army and sent to fight in Manchuria. An insanely nationalistic Hasegawa shows up there as his insane commanding officer and promptly orders suicide missions. Things continue to go downhill and we follow the characters to Siberia and Normandy.

The story is basically about how the saintly Korean man transforms the hateful Japanese man, reversing strains of bigotry and violence. It works better than it should, due primarily to the excellent work of actors Jang Dong-gun and Odagiri Jo. Odagiri is particularly good in his demanding role and his committed performance makes believable the extreme development of Hasegawa's character.

The war scenes are also excellently staged and filmed, uncomfortably brutal and chaotic.