On DVD: A Trailblazing Western Comes Blasting Out of... China?

Winking and bopping and hip-swiveling from its opening credits to its last gasp, Kim Jee-won's lo mein western The Good, the Bad, the Weird is an entrancing study in excess. As the camera swoops alongside through 1930s Manchuria to a hurtling locomotive about to be beset by multiple heists, you can just feel Quentin Tarantino's zipper strain. It's safe to say this is the first Chinese western (albeit a Korean film) -- not a "Chinese western" as the wuxia pian martial arts epics are sometimes called, but a western with outlaws, hired guns, frontier trains, shoot-outs, desert towns and cowboy hats, as genre-genuine as Clint Eastwood's poncho. Which, of course, is Italian.

The Sergio Leone-ish-ness is as self-conscious as the title -- thought too rambunctious and free-for-all to qualify as a remake, Kim's film lifts entire structures from Leone's The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, and scores of other movies, Tarantino-style, and puts the mixer on frappe. As the gunfights explode on the train, edited from five different directions and taking time to glimpse a goose sitting in a freshly bulletpocked corpse, you can't be blamed for thinking this is as much fun as cinema gets nowadays. The film has nothing to do with Hong Kong, strictly speaking, in its present state or in its hot-blooded '80s yesteryear, when Tsui Hark and John Woo etched new parameters for action-film hyperbole. But this is what that filmmaking zoo used to be like: no-holds-barred, fast as gunshot ricochets and fun as a fistful of firecrackers.

The Leonesque story revolves around the hunt for a treasure map, sought after by a sharpshooting bounty hunter (Jung Woo-sung); a sharpshooting, posturing psychopath with eyeliner and a hyper-coif (Lee Byung-hun); and a bumbling yet equally dangerous bandit (Song Kang-ho, the fat-faced Korean superstar equivalent to both Will Ferrell and Mark Ruffalo -- or something). Plus Manchurian bandit clans, the Japanese army (the history of Japanese colonialism is not ignored), and several other competing factions, all storming across the Asian plains trying to kill each other and win the prize. Kim, whose previous release here was the crepuscular K-horror opus A Tale of Two Sisters, is limitless in his camera energy but his editing balancing act is a triumph, too. Nowhere in the relentless, often hilarious mayhem are we mystified as to where we are or where the characters are in relation to each other.

If there's a problem with The Good, the Bad, the Weird, it's pacing -- there's no let-up. Leone movies are jam-packed 10-course meals of pulp stuff, too, but he knew when to ease up on the chaos and go for landscape grandeur and induce a druggy sense of melancholia for the vanishing of frontier, etc., a luxuriant wallowing in mood Tarantino has adopted as his own. Kim turns on his Gatling gun and never lets the trigger loose, and after a long while (the film is well over two hours) it can be numbing. Still, I wouldn't want to give up the penultimate set-piece, a 16-minute desert chase with cars, horses, motorbikes and crashing cameras, that's the damnedest popcorn-chew I've had in quite a few years.