The first ten minutes of "Guns And Talks" seems to promise a Korean version of an exciting "Alias"-style action-fest, with a post modern Tarantino/Richie-esque approach to its plotting. A quartet of good-looking, stylish young assassins that includes two brothers among their number, are out on a joint hit where each of them have to get to four well-guarded targets. The resulting set-piece is directed by Jin Jang with a flashy brio that climaxes with an audacious slow-motion shot of a (CGI) bullet piercing a car windscreen and entering its victim's forehead in a close-up shot that is positively Argento-esque in character (think of the key hole scene in "Opera" or the pill-swallowing sequence in "The Stendhal Syndrome"). When it quickly emerges that their client was an associate of an infamous Korean gang leader by the name of Tak Mun-bae (Son Hyeon-ju), and that their targets were all witnesses who were to have been used by the police to get the crime lord convicted (and hanged!), the film looks set to take a conventional but nonetheless exciting cat-and-mouse route, with detectives Kim and Cho hot on the trail of the meddlesome assassins who spoiled their three-year case against Mun-bae.
Except this is not the direction in which Jin Jang (who also wrote the film's screenplay) chooses to take things. Instead, although one should commend the writer/director for trying something different, the weirdly facetious quirkiness of his approach very soon degenerates into an annoying mishmash of sub-pots, loosely connected by the voice-over narration of the youngest of the four assassins (Bin Won). The problem lies in the fact that this strange all male family (headed by the fatherly Mr Ju, who supplies them with weapons and a remote hideout) are never made remotely believable in the first place: how did a bunch of good-looking youthful men, who barely look out of high school, end-up taking on such an amoral profession? The fact that they seem so good at their job only hightens the question. We're given four flashback sequences which take a comedic approach to their background (including the handsome Jae-yeong [Jeong Jae-yeong] whose Catholic faith means regular trips to the confession box to atone for mass murder!) but Jin Jang's script never really makes any one of the four leads seem remotely like a plausible, real person. Consequently, the fact that the film largely forgoes the action/drama direction in favour of a mainstream character comedy approach, becomes a major handicap. Jin Jang continues to lard the film with flashy visuals and split-screen sequences, and there are still several outstanding action sequences (the one set in an opera house during a performance of Hamlet is particularly spectacular), but the main body of the running time revolves around three of the gang becoming involved with women, and consequently losing their appetite for the amoral world of killing to order.
Firstly, Jung-woo (Shin Ha-kyun) cannot bring himself to kill a pretty young woman after he finds out that she is heavily pregnant. He soon finds himself becoming involved romantically with her, and learns that her ex-lover does not want responsibility for the child and so has employed the assassins to get rid of the problem. Jung-woo's problem is: how does he account for his repeated failure to perform the hit to his three increasingly suspicious friends? Secondly, leader of the gang, Sang-Yeon (Shin Hyeon-jun), is repeatedly plagued by a sweet-faced school girl who insists that she wants him to perform a hit for her. Finally, a prominent TV news reader called Young-ran Ho, whom all the members of the gang are completely infatuated with, contacts Sang-yeon and asks him to kill a famous, high-profile actor ... while he's on stage giving a performance! The leader is so smitten with her that he is prepared to take on this extremely risky job despite the fact that the two detectives that have been hunting them since the Mun-bae fiasco, are now closing in on the gang.
If it is difficult to take four handsome youngsters seriously as a gang of ruthless hit men, it is even more difficult to believe just how quickly every single one of them crumbles when confronted by just a hint of a coy glance from a pretty woman! The nadir of the film is reached when Jung-woo is confronted by the rest of the gang over his relationship with the pregnant woman. The youngest member of the group ends up giving the most vacuous speech imaginable (at least in English translation) on the nature of love, which results in all four supposedly hard-bitten killers breaking down in tears on each-other's shoulders! This silly sentimental element doesn't sit well with the violent set-pieces; and scenes where the four killers sit around the TV screen in doe-eyed adoration of Young-ran ho only compound the complete
unbelievability of the whole scenario.
"Guns And Talks" is a resoundingly trivial film that doesn't even resolve any of its tangents in a satisfactory manner, let alone what passes for the main storyline. Third window Films, nevertheless, give it a nice DVD presentation -- although extras are restricted to a cursory five minute sequence of "behind-the-scenes" footage, a series of trailers and ... a Bon Jovi video?!
