Woochi the Demon Slayer, apparently based on a Korean folktale, is billed as the first great Korean superhero movie; the blurb reads: “A rascal wizard travels in time and returns to save the world!”
Woochi is a young, undisciplined wizard who can’t be bothered studying Taoism. Three Taoist gods, as dopey as the Three Stooges, trap him in a painting for 500 years, until his return in the present day. The plot, so far as there is one, is that Woochi is searching for a sacred pipe for some reason; he has a sidekick, Chorangyi, a dog in human form, and he’s opposed by an evil wizard called Hwadam and three shape-shifting goblin demons. There’s a lot of magical, superhero fighting. And that’s about it.
The first third of the film, set in 1509, is basically the prologue; it contains far too much exposition, not made any easier by all of it being in subtitles rather than dubbed. At two-and-a-quarter hours the film is far, far too long; cutting the prologue from 45 to 10 minutes would have helped.
The cuts between scenes are often so abrupt they confuse the already confusing story even more and add to the jerky quality of the whole thing. The switching between live action and CGI is sometimes obvious, and some of the wire work is ridiculously unrealistic. Okay, it’s a light fantasy, but the effect is to make the film feel like a comic strip. with actors leaping from frame to frame.
Some of the English sub-titles are laughable, and many of them seem to have been translated by Google or Babel Fish: “What happens if the Archgod blows the Pipe? Why, the world will be healed! Goblins will fall to hell, and the mighty Archgod will rise once again. And we can finally return to the heavens. But after a moment, you will wait for ages.”
There are a lot of set-piece scenes, from over-long wire fights to over-long Keystone Cops car chases, much of it – it’s those Stooges again – coming over as slapstick.
There are inevitably echoes of popular superhero TV series: Woochi is often like Heroes’s Hiro at his most smugly irritating, and one scene is a direct copy of Peter and Nathan Petrelli flying off a rooftop; while the (many) fight scenes are reminiscent of Xena/Hercules without the credibility.
If this film were marketed as a spoof, there would be some excuse, but the extras (a full second DVD) show clearly that’s not how the director and cast view it. The three hours of extras (the Blu-ray has four) are uninspiring. The “making of” documentary is simply endless shots of rehearsals for and repeated takes of wire work and other stunts; and in one interview after another actors and crew say, how much they enjoyed working on the film and how much they hope we will enjoy it too.
Chorangyi is the one spot-on idea in the whole film: as a sidekick he’s so utterly faithful and bumblingly enthusiastic that you expect him to jump up at Woochi and lick his face. And some of the wire work really is cool. And somehow, despite the clichés, and if you give up trying to follow the story and just enjoy the action, the film becomes strangely compelling by the end. It’s all very silly, but it really is so bad it’s almost good.
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