THE PRESIDENT'S LAST BANG

With all the court intrigue of a Shakespearean drama, Im Sangsoo’s The President’s Last Bang, presents the 1979 assassination of South Korean President Park Chunghee as a bloody political coup perpetrated by a gang-who-couldn’t-shoot-straight.

A military leader who oversaw South Korea’s postwar economic boom, Park became a corrupt puppet of big business (Samsung is rumored to have launched a campaign to discredit Last Bang) who rewrote the constitution at personal whim, employed thug tactics against dissenters with his secret police (The KCIA) and enjoyed a decadent lifestyle that rivaled North Korea’s Kim Jong Il.

Mixing matter-of-fact brutality with deadpan satire, director Im Sangsoo’s tightly structured and comically glib film takes aim at South Korea’s attitudes toward class, politics, and the military/industrial complex.

KCIA Director Kim Jaegyu (Baik Yoonshik), suffering from a bad liver and years-too-late guilty conscience, decides that he’s had enough of Park’s corrupt regime. Invited to a private soiree at the longtime dictator’s safe house, Kim sees his opportunity. While Park (Song Jae-ho) and his two most trusted yes-men, the crooked General Cha (Jeong Won-jung) and sniveling chief secretary Yang (Kwun Byung-gil), slurp down alcohol and food while pawing at young women, Kim and his top men impulsively put their plan into motion.

Director Sangsoo uses this calm before the blood-spattered storm to expertly build tension. He tightly winds the action, carefully putting his chess pieces into place, while injecting some absurdly funny dialogue. Park’s boasts of a seal testicle dietary regimen are particularly memorable. It is during this pulse-quickening prelude to violence that the director emulates David Fincher’s Panic Room, shooting the dictator’s manor from every possible angle, using beautifully constructed tracking shots that simmer with violent possibility. When the fireworks finally erupt, they are startling swift and bloody.

Unfortunately, Kim hadn’t really planned for the coup’s aftermath. Without a follow-up strategy he and his men quickly get caught up in the state’s still-corrupt machinery and find themselves trapped.

This stranger-than-fiction account expertly captures the buffoonish chaos of Kim’s reckless coup while serving up every form of human foible and hypocrisy. Officious morons, pompous bureaucrats, incompetent tough guys and hapless bystanders all end up in the director’s crosshairs. At first it’s a bit hard to follow and some of the story gets lost in translation but once the assassination gears start turning, Last Bang is riveting.

Sangsoo’s pacing is relentlessly pitch-perfect. Every frame of the film is beautifully composed and rapturously shot. The blood and guts action is buoyed by Hong-jib Kim’s tango-flavored soundtrack, giving the violent subject matter a farcical bottom note.

The straight-faced comedy doesn’t quite work however. Sangsoo’s droll sense of humor while appropriately black relies too much on understated slapstick. Broad as all the punching and slapping is, there is never a sense of the outrageous or hysterical. Furthermore he all but ignores the human elements of the story, eschewing insight or comment for terse farce. Maybe the absurd facts of this real-life event seemed shocking enough. After all, the South Korean government, angered by the film, censored four minutes of documentary footage from its opening.

Though it never ascends to the heights of Dr. Strangelove –its characters are far too sober and its jokes just aren’t that inspired—The President’s Last Bang is nevertheless deliciously entertaining.