Dachimawa Lee (2008)

Dachimawa Lee (2008)

  • 5.3
  • 100 mins
  • Comedy, Action

Storyline

A Korean super-spy hunts a stolen national treasure, the Golden Buddha.



Short Review

This is a short movie stretched out to a full-length feature and it definitely shows in the final cut of the film. The film throws so much schtick, slapstick, gross-out humor, absurd scenes at you in the first half that the second half of the movie is really lackluster by comparison. It simply doesn't match the first half's energy and when that's all you have, that's a pretty big problem. I liken this movie to a race where one person is clearly in the lead for about 95% of the film, but at the last stretch of the race they completely gas out and end up coming in last. Perhaps, that's a little too dramatic, but this film came out of the with so much schtick that it'd give Family Guy a run for its money. And to be honest, a lot of it, for me, really worked. The film is a parody of the spy genre, for the most part, but it parodies action, romance, westerns, etc. The best way to describe this film would be if James Bond had sex with an even goofier Austin Powers. I know Austin Powers is a spoof, but that's what it felt like to me watching this movie. You could say that the film tries to do too many things at once, and while understandable, this is what makes the film, at least its first half, so entertaining. The fact that it's trying out so much and seeing what sticks and what doesn't is part of its charms. Problem is that, and I apologize for the very obscene analogy, the film shot its wad coming right out of the gate. This film was firmly on its way to, at least, 3.5 stars with how it was going. And then the film ran out of steam and each joke kept getting more and more unfunny as the film hobbled its way to its climax. The film's problems, even if I loved the first half of the film, is that the jokes really aren't as spread out as they could've been. They stuck so much at the first part of the film that they almost forgot that they had a second part that was practically a ghost town. Yet, and I'm pretty they were aware of this, no effort was made to make sure that the jokes were better paced and spread out throughout the entire film, so you could have a consistently funny movie. They had 3 hours worth of jokes that they tried to fit into an hour of film while also forgetting that they had 40 more minutes of movie to fill. And that's the film's biggest problem, they're simply cramming too much stuff into a very limited amount of time. It would've been crammed even if the film had been properly paced with the jokes spread out throughout the entire movie, so you can imagine how crammed it must've been when all the schtick happens in the first hour of the film. If it wasn't for that, I think this film would've been an easy 3.5 for me. The second half of the movie really drags the whole thing down. It's never disastrous or catastrophic but this film simply never recovers. And that's a shame, because I found some of the slapstick and the jokes to be really quite funny. If you're going to watch this movie, watch it until Dachimawa Lee loses his memory. You'll thank me later.


Trailer


Streaming Service

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