Hwang Wook’s Mash Ville has all the ingredients of a great Western, but a languishing pace, poor visuals and an unfocused story make it sink very quickly.
Director: Hwang Wook
Genre: Comedy, Western, Action
Run Time: 126′
Fantasia Premiere: July 21, 2024
Release Date: TBA
Ah, festivals. Love them or hate them (who hates festivals, though?), one thing’s for sure: you’re going to either stumble upon absolute masterpieces that you can’t wait for everyone to see or unwatchable, unreleasable nonsense that may never see the light of day outside the festival circuit.
Usually, there’s no in-between, though sometimes films are hyperbolically praised or hated by the public who get to see it for the very first time. In the case of Hwang Wook’s Mash Ville, which had its world premiere at the Fantasia International Film Festival in the Cheval Noir section, it’s unfortunately the case of a nearly-unwatchable, dull genre hybrid.
The film is presented as a modern-day Western through its extensive use of medium shots, yellow filters, cowboy hats, and a plot that mostly centers around alcohol. And it immediately sets its position with a strikingly shot assassination of a citizen by two homicidal cultists. The opening scene is the best part of the movie, because not only the violence hits hard, but the colors are intriguing to look at. Its inventive costume design is also a highlight: detailed fits that teeter the line between modern-day and period looks, always tipping the hat of the films that came before while looking into the future.
The same, however, can’t be said for its cinematography. Barring its opening scene, Mash Ville is tinted with the worst use of the yellow filter seen since Lars von Trier’s The Element of Crime. It makes each scene look particularly murky and unimpressive, though its sparse use of black-and-white as it introduces each character in the film gives it a bit of a jolt. The only scene in which the yellow filter isn’t used is during the aforementioned assassination, where the blunt violence seems to consume the audience as they quickly get pulled into Wook’s hybrid of appropriating traditional Western tropes with a darkly comedic tone.
But the comedy isn’t funny, and most of the film’s plot is so threadbare that it’s hard to even understand what’s happening on screen. The bulk of the story is about Joo Se-jong (Chun Sin-hwan) and his two younger brothers (Park Jong-hwan & Park Seong-il) selling bootleg alcohol in a small rural town, which kills the people who drink it. After someone sends the booze to another town, the trio must attempt to retrieve it before someone else dies, but they come across the aforementioned cultists. There’s another storyline involving a film director (I think? It’s never entirely clear what her purpose is in the film) that adds absolutely nothing to the film at-hand and stretches the runtime to interminable heights.
Running at 126 minutes, Mash Ville had all the opportunity of doing something special, because it’s rare that a Western gets made – and released – in South Korea. The last time a Western this huge was released in South Korea was 2008’s The Good, The Bad and the Weird, and there could be hope Mash Ville would pave the way for Korean artists to do more of them.
While I agree that more Westerns should be released in South Korea, especially following Kim Jee-woon’s masterpiece, what Wook presents here isn’t at all interesting, primarily because he doesn’t know which tone to adopt. Is it supposed to be entirely funny? Should it be more violent and dramatic? Should it solely stay in Western tropes without veering too far off from them? All of these are valid questions to ask, but Wook doesn’t have the answers.
He instead stays in the film’s introductory phase for a good hour-and-a-half or so, slowly moving the plot and stretching every unfunny scene until they become irritating. There isn’t a single moment of humor that works, barring a fun smash-cut that occurs in the movie’s midsection. Instead of developing his world, and creating a new, modern vision of the Western, Wook stays in platitudes and never gives us anything to grasp into, either through the characters, the photography, or the story at-hand, which is treated in an extremely unengaging and formless fashion. The jokes are also extremely specific, meaning that if you don’t vibe with Wook’s sense of humor, it may never even click for you. But I would argue that even fans of this type of comedy may find it tiresome, because he never seems to want to develop his characters past the unfunny situations he puts them in.
Thankfully, the acting is mostly competent, and most of the players seem to enjoy being in the project, but they can’t salvage a script that leads its characters nowhere, and never develops them past an interesting point for 126 minutes. Wook would have had the time to create interesting arcs and meaningful relationships, even if his world is poorly-defined. That would’ve at least made the movie somewhat compelling to watch, shoddy photography aside. He also would’ve benefited from making his intentions far clearer than they are in the movie, because it’s never clear if the film is a traditional Western, meaning that it’s steeped into classic iconography, even if it attempts to modernize Western tropes, or a quasi-Western, wearing some influences, but straying away from the genre for most of the runtime.
Because of this cardinal mistake, Mash Ville never clicks with its audience, whether from the characters themselves or the story Wook presents. It continuously has difficulty finding its footing, and when it eventually does with a somewhat gripping climax that acts as Wook’s response to Sergio Leone’s The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly, it’s too little too late. As a result, the film feels like a massive waste of time, and it’s a shame to say this. Perhaps this will become a cult classic in a few years, but as it stands, Mash Ville may never find an audience beyond the Concordia walls.
Mash Ville premiered at the Fantasia Film Festival on July 21, 2024.
