I'm probably a little late getting to this, but I caught this film last night not quite knowing what to expect. In fact, my friend had mistakenly believed it to be a Stephen Chow film, so we were expecting a surreal comedy along the lines of Kung Fu Hustle or Shaolin Soccer. Instead, The Good, the Bad, and the Weird has absolutely nothing to do with Stephen Chow, but without this mistaken association I might never have seen the film.

If you're not familiar with the film or the premise, the title is a really big clue. It's a sendup of Sergio Leone's "The Good, The Bad, and the Ugly", and has a plotline that stays close enough to the original that can be considered something of a remake or a homage. Since this is an Asian film (Korean, specifically), the characters are a mixture of Japanese, Chinese, and Koreans, and the main setting is the open steppe country of Manchuria and the eerily 'western' feeling outskirts of the Gobi Desert in the 1930s. The Japanese occupy Manchuria and Korea, but on the Chinese frontier bandits and ne'er do wells rule the day.

The movie is kicked off with a Japanese head honcho hiring a bandit (the Bad) to steal a map from a train. Just before they attack the train in a mayhem-filled spectacle, however, a train robber (the Weird) stumbles upon the map while robbing the wealthiest looking people on the train. He doesn't know what to make of the map, but when the Bad and his goons try to kill him he makes good his escape, partly aided by a lone drifter and bounty hunter (the Good) who attacks the bandits from behind. The Weird makes off with the map and later discovers it to be a sort of treasure map, kicking off an enormous and violent treasure hunt across Manchuria.

Most of the time today, people sort of write off the Western genre as something old-fashioned and obsolete, done to death. The image of a 'western' usually conjures up memories of John Wayne, native marauders on horseback, black hats, white hats, and the Wilhelm Scream. In spite of the later films of the genre that tried to offset the stereotype, most people of younger generations (myself included) picture Westerns as sort of fuddy duddy films. However, if anyone has had the fortune of playing Red Dead Redemption, which is an excellently crafted interactive take on the Wild West, or has seen The Wild Bunch, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid, or the quintissential The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, you might have started to warm up to the idea of the 'gritty' western.

The Good, the Bad, and the Wierd doesn't really moralize, and like the best 'gritty' westerns is populated by madmen, eccentrics, scam artists, and highfalootin' capitalists (people who tend to capitalize on others' misfortunes, rather than adhere to actual capitalism). The main characters themselves aren't exactly heroic either, although the villain (the Bad) is certainly of villainous methods.

The Good, for all intents and purposes, looks like he walked out of a western storybook. He wears a felt duster, a stetson, dungarees, a vest, and cowboy boots and curiously uses a lever-action rifle while everyone else is using a mixture of Pre-WWII weaponry. As an obvious analogy to the high plains drifter, the Wierd does good to point out that the Good is not actually the hero he makes himself out to be, but just another goofball with goofball habits.

The Bad iconically always dresses in a black suit and has a humorous emo hairdo, but like his nemesis the Good somehow manages to stay immaculately clean. There's obviously a bit of tongue-in-cheek humor going on as the movie, fundamentally, is about helping us remember what's strange and silly about Westerns as well as reminding us how exciting and good they can be.

The Weird is what you may call the main character of the film, since he's introduced early and is the main focus of much of the storytelling. Unlike the Good or the Bad, the Weird gets dirty like everyone else, he fights dirty like anyone would, he doesn't have tremendous skill to support himself and so he survives through guile, trickery, and a bit of humor. He's clearly the character the audience is supposed to be able to relate to on a personal level, but even he is fundamentally iffy- a renegade who's running from his criminal past who dreams of one day owning a farm, when in reality it's clear that he knows as much about farming as I do about quantum physics.

When it comes to the fights, this film bears little resemblance to any of the martial arts flicks to come out of China within the last decade. There is a scene that gets a little silly where the Good swings around on a rope for a couple of minutes while blowing badguys away, but no one hops off of bamboo sticks or delivers some ancient secret death moves. If someone dies, it's cause they've been shot... or something far worse. Combat wise, the movie is all about the gunplay, and given the hodgepodge of characters with a hodgepodge of weapons (from wooden mallets to artillery pieces) they spring a surprising variety of interesting gun battles and tricks, and the many bullet effects in the film are quite well done. While the fighting can be over the top, I never once got bored or rolled my eyes while taking in the chaotic battles. Without going into too much detail, there's at least one kind of gunfight and one 'trick' that gets pulled that discerning action cinema buffs should appreciate. It's all there, like a candy store. Only with bullets.

In the end, The Good The Bad and The Weird is a curious cinema experiment. It's a Korean film take on the American West, but only the type of American West that was filmed in Italy. It's morally ambiguous, populated with curious characters, has a simple story that's easy to get into, and pulls a couple of humorous and clever twists along the way. While not without flaws and some of the 'guilty pleasures' of Asian cinema, it's certainly worth renting, and maybe even worth buying.