[K-Movie Night] Start-up

by Dramaddictally

Welcome to K-Movie Night — a once-a-month feature where we microwave some popcorn, put on a face mask, and get cozy with a Korean movie from yesteryear. With so many films finally streaming (with subs!), now is the time to get caught up on all those movies we missed featuring our favorite drama actors.

Each month, we’ll pick a flick, write a review, and meet you back here to discuss whether or not it’s worth a watch. Super simple. All you have to do is kick up your feet and join us in the comments!

 
MOVIE REVIEW

Since summer and action movies go together like chaebol heroes and Candy heroines, it seemed like the right time to finally check out Start-up – a Jung Hae-in action comedy that I (gasp!) had never seen. As far as actors go, not only is he too adorable for words, he’s also got a ton of range and I’ve found his film characters endearing in distinct ways from his drama characters. (If you somehow missed Tune in for Love, I recommend you cue that up next on your watch list.) Beyond that, we’ll be seeing him in the new friends-to-lovers rom-com Love Next Door slated for August — and I’m having a lot of trouble keeping my cool until then.

Also starring in Start-up is Park Jung-min who you might have seen in the recent Netflix global ratings sensation The 8 Show, which maintained its spot in the top 10 charts through May and June this year. With talent, tough talk, and teenage angst bursting at the seams, I went into this movie with an open mind, a lot of popcorn, and the hope of at least a few belly laughs.

We open on two best friends and their one motorbike, which is newly acquired but on the verge of breaking down. Right away, we’re in the middle of a chase scene marked by comedy, cursing, and a should-have-died crash — where the two leads, TAEK-IL (Park Jung-min) and SANG-PIL (Jung Hae-in), get up and walk away unharmed. The tone tells us we’re in for low-level violence that’s taken in stride, and high-energy quirks that match the speed of young men trying to figure out their life paths.

Taek-il and Sang-pil are high school dropouts, supposedly studying for their equivalency exams so they can apply to college, but really slacking off, smoking, and generally getting into trouble. Taek-il lives with his mom (Yeom Jung-ah) — an ex-pro-volleyball player who now uses her severe serving skills to smack him to the ground when he winds up at the police station. Sang-pil, for his part, takes care of his grandmother, who’s losing her memory and doesn’t even remember his name. Both boys are notably without fathers, their female caregivers barely getting by, and the sense of being adrift is the stronghold of the film as we see how it guides their behavior.

With nothing to do or look forward to — and tired of being nagged by Mom — Taek-il runs away from home and ends up all the way down in Gunsan, where he gets a job at a Chinese restaurant and makes friends with the wacky characters that work there. The chef, GEO-SEOK (Ma Dong-seok), becomes a reluctant but important ally, even as he dishes out a storm of slaps, knockouts, and falls to the floor that Taek-il must endure (these are the running gags — better get used to it).

Meanwhile, back in Seoul, Sang-pil is forging his own path with a job as a debt collector. But even though he tells Taek-il that he’s in “the financial business,” it’s not as highfalutin as it sounds. He’s working for loan sharks, chasing down debtors in the street and talking like a mobster, all while preaching the gospel that they’re helping people who have nowhere else to turn for support. He’s so convinced (or, I’d say, so happy to be a part of something that feels important) that he tries to persuade Taek-il to come back and join the business too.

But Taek-il is becoming more entrenched in his new surroundings, repeatedly having run-ins with a scrappy loner who has bright red hair and a penchant for starting fights with men (including him). KYUNG-JOO (Choi Sung-eun, who played another kick-butt role this year in My Name is Loh Kiwan) clearly has trauma in her backstory, but it’s never revealed exactly what happened to her. All we know is that she can handle herself in boxing matches with boys, until she can’t — running down the street barefoot and bloodied as a couple of thugs relentlessly chase after her.

When the crew at the Chinese restaurant comes to her rescue (hapless as they are), we begin to see exactly what kind of story we’re watching. One by one, we’re collecting a cast of disconnected characters — people with no real sense of home — and the journey is about how these social misfits will find their way in the world and where they’ll fit into it. As they begin to bunch in together, we can already guess the answer: when you get enough outliers in one place, they suddenly become the norm.

Except, Taek-il himself is an outlier within this group. His mom truly cares about him, even if neither feels at ease in each other’s company. To try to get him back home, she opens a restaurant, names it after him, and says she’ll support him in his studies if he returns. In response, he pushes her away, telling her to just live her own life and stop worrying about him. She begins to cry and he leaves his paycheck — the first he’s ever earned — as a way to show (dismissive) care for her.

This scene is the deepest we get in the film. It’s pithy in that both mom and son want to be there for each other, but they’re each so alienated that they have no idea how to be. They’re standing in the same space and yet there’s an invisible wall between them. Each is trying to reach out and support the other, but neither allows themselves to accept what the other is offering. And while the story is from Taek-il’s perspective, the scene does a good job of digging up empathy for this single mother’s struggle.

Things start to fall apart when two restaurants are torn up at once. On one side, Sang-pil goes to collect a debt from a restaurant owner and is thrown through a window. It’s the first job he’s done on his own and he takes this setback personally, driving him into a quick madness. On the other side, the Chinese restaurant is under attack, surfacing the backstories of the staff — showing us how they met and became tied to each other for the long haul.

Here’s where the film takes a sudden serious turn and it’s a little hard to come back to the humorous no-one-gets-hurt violence that we’ve gotten used to once some disturbing (but mostly unshown) actions are on the table. As they’re driven down to essentials, or back to the places from which they came, this group of non-belongers begins to actively turn toward each other for help. And with some unbelievably easy wrap-ups, they’re able to let go of what they thought they needed or were trying to escape in order to come full circle — which might just be the best place to start-up.

The highlight of this film is its endearing characters and ability to make you care about this troupe of weirdos. But it’s precisely because I cared about them that the ending comes as a bit of letdown. We don’t get to see them fix their problems; they’re just resolved. And even if this is ultimately what we want for this club of lonely hearted heroes, the buildup of their conflicts is so entertaining that seeing them prevail without seeing how they undo their knots sort of misses the point. When you finally find the place where you belong, it’s also nice to know all the roads you took to get there.

Join us in August for the next K-Movie Night and let’s make a party of it! We’ll be watching Little Forest (2018) and posting the review during the last week of the month.

Want to participate in the comments when it posts? You’ve got 3 weeks to watch! Rather wait for the review before you decide to stream it? We’ve got you covered.

 
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