THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG
Directed & Written by: Im Sangsoo.
Produced by: Shim Jaemyung & Shin Chul.
Director of Photography: Kim Woohyung.
Edited by: Lee Eunsoo.
Music by: Kim Hongjip.
Released by: Kino.
Language: Korean with English subtitles.
Country of Origin: South Korea. 102 min. Not Rated.
With: Han Sukgyu, Baik Yoonshik, Song Jaeho & Kim Eungsoo.

This at times uproariously entertaining, albeit superficial political satire depicts the 1979 assassination of South Korean President Park Chunghee. Writer/director Im Sangsoo perhaps has been influenced by the recent political tension between Japan and South Korea. His President Park (Song Jaeho) is an elitist womanizing slimeball, speaking mostly in Japanese, which he had picked up during his military career in the Japanese army long before his ascent to power. Though Park is historically credited for transforming South Korea from an underdeveloped country into an industrial powerhouse, the film insists he did so with an authoritarian rule that increasingly grew into a dictatorship.

Left to cover-up the President's dirty affairs are Korean CIA (KCIA) Director Kim Jaegyu (Baik Yoonshik) and his young right-hand man Ju (Han Sukgyu). Bullied out of the President's favor by his rival, the president's Chief Bodyguard Cha (Jeong Wonjoong), Kim becomes increasingly frustrated. To top it all off, he suffers from a bad liver that increasingly drives his already fragile mental state up the wall. Despite his doctor's advice to take some time off, Kim fulfills the President's demand to set up yet another dinner party at the KCIA safe house complete with young female escorts (cue the title's double-entendre). It is hard to tell whether it is Kim's inherent neurosis or his waning liver that drives him to the tipping point, but some time before the dinner party, Kim lets Ju know that tonight is the night he assassinates the President and as a "bonus," his rival Cha. The karaoke dinner party ends abruptly when Kim shoots the sake-soaked President point-blank "for the sake of democracy."

The anticipatory buildup to the John Woo-esque bloodbath is finely wrought, with virtuoso camerawork gracefully panning over the many layers of imagined as well as factual occurrences that happened moments before the actual assassination. Yoonshik is arresting as Director Kim, his subtle performance the antithesis of the gut-wrenching agony he conveyed as the tortured victim in Save the Green Planet. Yoonshik's Kim is passionate as he is naive (Kim curls up with a blanket and rests with contentment after the assassination). When he is finally caught by the government and promptly jailed, we are left to wonder whether he was a misunderstood soul or simply a lunatic.

The director, on the other hand, could have used some of Yoonshik's subtlety. From its slapstick humor to the film's clunky concluding voice-over condemning the KCIA, the film does not leave its mark as an insightful political observation. Yet in the same vane as the recent remake of The Manchurian Candidate, it is a droll morality tale of a power trip gone terribly wrong. Marie Iida
October 14, 2005