Korean Movie Night: Friend 2 친구 2 (2013) Korean

Yu Oh Seong, Kim Woo Bin, Joo Jin Mo, Jung Ho Bin

Movie rating: 6/10     Neck score: A

The last movie during our marathon weekend was Chingu 2. Compared to Chingu, it was a lot easier to follow in the sense of it being more modern and closer to what we were used to, but Chingu was a much better movie. While Chingu 1 was about friendship, this one was just a gangster movie. It only had a few actor from the original, the gangster Joon Suk (Yu Oh Seong) and his gang member Eun Ki, who has progressed in the gang since getting out of prison, and everyone else was just added to this plot. This leaves it feeling a lot more shallow, since there is less depth of character and a lot less emotion to it. Also, we miss the rich character development. The story also jumps around a lot as it is telling not only the story of the present, but also a year or so ago, the original movie timeline, and the past of Joon Suk's father, who started the gang back in the 1960s. All that jumping around makes it a bit confusing at times.



On the plus side the visuals stay up as Kim Woo Bin enters the scene, playing the son of Dong Soo (Jang Dong Gun), which totally works for me. He was probably the reason I wanted to add Chingu 2 to the list. I was pretty obsessed with him at the time. Enough to watch Heirs and Uncontrollably Fond pretty much just for him. He's the younger generation of gangster, hot tempered and full of aggression. He has grow up with a series of lousy stepdads and no good male figures in his life. When his mom asks Joon Suk to look after her son while they are in prison together, they develop a good mentor relationship, giving him the first positive adult male influence in his life. This leads them to continuing that mentoring relationship after they both get out, as Joon Suk enlists his help in reestablishing his place in the gang which as grow shaky due to Eun Ki's rise in power. This only becomes problematic when they both realize that Sung Hoon (Kim Woo Bin) is the son of Dong Soo, the friend that Joon Suk went to jail for supposedly killing. That would put a rock in their relationship.

So while it is about the relationship between Joon Suk and Sung Hoon, it is predominantly about the gang wars. There are a lot more gang fights, and some more stark violence, including some chainsaw violence. That was a little shocking. We were also constantly wondering where the nudity would be, since we got a rating warning at the start saying there would be some. I think there might have been some briefly, but it was over before we could realize what was happening. It was a "wait, was that the nudity? What did we just see? I don't know!" But the part that probably frustrated us the most is that it was still unclear by the end of this one who ordered the hit. I felt like this show was trying to solve that in part, but it never clarified it, at least to our satisfaction. Did he really have his friend killed? Was it someone higher up? Was it Eun Ki? Maybe we were just not understanding the nuances once again, but it was driving us nuts at the end, wondering what we were supposed to think about it.

So a lot less character development, a lot less depth of emotions, and a lot more violence and gang fighting. I feel like the jumping around made it harder to get that depth, even while it was supposed to give us more character background. I also don't know what the point of the 1960s scenes were for, since they brought little to the overall story, except maybe to show the progression of the gangs, from fist fighters, to knife fighters and organized crime. It also has some focus on the underlying theme of friendship, but not enough to justify it in my books. It was more of a distraction, and an excuse to go all glitzy Italian mafia on us. It added to the overall stereotypical gangster movie effect, taking away from the meaning of the friendship of the first.