Worth: $11.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Cynthia, Park Eun-bin, Jin Goo Seo Eun-soo, Justin John Harvey, Lee Jong-suk, Seong Yu-bin
Intro:
... technically impressive, looks nice, but doesn’t really mean anything.
2018’s The Witch: Part 1 – The Subversion is an odd little film. Starting out as a blend of Elfen Lied and Pop Idol, and eventually breaking out into an overclocked action fest, it’s an outside-the-box take on the typical South Korean revenge thriller.
It takes a bit to really get going, and it’s held back by the ‘filmed for the box-set’ mentality in its construction, but thanks to the intrigue surrounding its main character and the high-speed impact of the fight scenes, it still worked rather well.
Building a new IP off its back could also work out well, or could it?
The story ostensibly centres on Cynthia, aka Shin Sia, as another escapee of the program that created the genetically-engineered supermen of the original, but there’s a lot going on around her. Taken in by kindly Kyung-hee (Park Eun-bin), there’s also local crime boss Yong-doo (Jin Goo) who wants Kyung-hee’s farm, Seo Eun-soo and Justin John Harvey as two ‘Union’ agents who are trying to track down the girl, a superpowered institute team lead by Jang (Lee Jong-suk), who are also trying to find the girl, as well as general millings-about behind the scenes regarding the fallout of the previous film.
While there seems to be a lot going on, not much really comes of it. None of the individual factions come across as particularly interesting, with the Union agents the biggest offenders. Eun-soo is just too bland to be convincing, and Harvey’s attempts to be ‘cool’ are more adorable than anything else. There’s conflict, yeah, but purely for its own sake, not to continue the plot. It’s an amplification of the original’s franchise-ready stance, revealing a production that’s more interested in bulking out its universe than with having interesting things happening in it. Lore isn’t the same thing as having a story.
And in the middle of it all is the girl, who is just credited as ‘girl’ because that’s how much of a character she has. Like the story around her, she only exists in relation to the people around her, with the relationship between her and Kyung-hee’s brother Dae-gil (Seong Yu-bin) taking precedence over anything to do with her. There are traces of the same mysterious aura that made Goo Ja-yoon so interesting last time, only without any follow-through. Seeing her tear people to pieces with superpowers is neat and all, but a beating heart underneath all that would’ve been nice. It’s like Mona Lisa and The Blood Moon all over again.
The Witch: Part 2 – The Other One, much like the backdrop for its climax, is a fireworks display. It’s technically impressive, looks nice, but doesn’t really mean anything. It’s overstuffed to the point where it feels like at least four different movies are actively competing with each other for prominence, even its healthy action sensibilities aren’t enough to excuse the waste. This isn’t the next step forward for a promising film franchise; it’s just The Other One.
