The Good, the Bad, the Weird (2008)

There is a moment in Kim Jee-woon's 2008 Manchurian Western when three men arrive at the treasure they have bled for and find a boarded-over hole in the desert. That is the film in miniature, and it is also, apparently, the closest this production comes to a political statement. The oil that eventually geysers out of the useless hole reads as a punchline about greed, not a lament for the planet. The treasure is worthless, the villains are numerous, and the movie has no interest whatsoever in telling us how to feel about any of it. It simply wants to move.

And move it does. The cast is entirely Korean, which is not a casting philosophy so much as a fact of a South Korean production. The Manchurian backdrop supplies Japanese soldiers, Chinese bandits and Russian horsemen, but these are period antagonists and period scenery, deployed because 1939 Manchuria was a crowded and violent place. The film is a male-dominated outlaw picture with a handful of women at the margins, no romantic interiority to speak of, and no interest in the bodies of its characters beyond how far they can be thrown through the air. Song Kang-ho, Lee Byung-hun and Jung Woo-sung spend the runtime shooting at one another across a dusty plain, and the screenplay asks nothing of them except stamina.

So we are left with a rollicking homage to Sergio Leone that received Cannes screenings, warm reviews and a respectable worldwide gross, and that carries almost none of the cultural freight a contemporary viewer might brace for. It is loud, it is long, and it wears you out sooner than it should, as one American critic observed at the time. But it is not preaching. It has nothing to say about history it did not invent, nothing to say about money it does not undercut with a gag, and nothing to say about identity at all. A rare and restful thing: an action film with no agenda and a body count.