... of glowsticks & dice

My Wife is a Gangster
Saturday, October 06, 2007

Korean title: Jopog Manura (조폭 마누라)
Release date: 2001
Running time: 105 minutes
Directed by: Cho Jin-gyu
Cast you care about: Shin Eun-kyung (Mantis)
Park Sang-myeon (Soo-il)
Ahn Jae-mo (Romeo)
Kim In-kwon (Boxers)

Mantis is the leader of a local gang, with Romeo and Boxers as two of her underlings. She marries a local retard to chill her dying sister out. Then a lot of stuff happens.

Rainy day. Perfect time for a bunch of men in suits to frolick around in the puddles with axes and baseball bats. Amidst all this fun, and just as one of the guys gets his head axed in, scissors fly and strike home. Enter the bitch-chick, Mantis, leader of the local rabble. She clears the floor and saves her buddies. Thus conclude the first 5 minutes of the movie.

Mantis, not the hottest ho' in town, is looking after the gang while her boss is on a well-earned holiday. Apart from running with scissors, she has been spending her time on tracing the whereabouts of her long lost sister, whom she was separated of as a child. When she finally finds her, it turns out that she's fatally ill and, of course, has a dying wish: Mantis must get married. Now I don't know about you people, but I guess dying kind of sucks so there'd be a lot of things that I would wish for if I had the chance, but this is not one of them. Anyhow, things are different in Korea, apparently. Mantis obliges.

The victim is a local near-retard called Soo-il. He's the slowest guy in town and therefore the perfect match. They meet, they marry, but is little sister happy? No she's not. Her FINAL final wish is for Mantis to get pregnant. Not really in a position to negotiate, I'd say, but our female gang boss goes for it. Basically, Soo-il has been sulking, all moody and emotional for not getting any up until this point, but this time around, Mantis is ready for rape. Now, I've been edumacated too, so I knew what was about to happen. No sweet loving here, 'cause I read on wikepedia that a female mantis is supposed to rip the male's head off after doing the deed. Imagine my disappointment then, when that didn't happen. She just got pregnant instead.

Well, the sister is really excited but dies anyway, so with that out of the way, it's time for more fighting. Some Japanese dude with knifes challenges our Korean heroine with scissors. A flashy fight scene ends with an impotent Jap. Ouch. He's still alive though, and ready to carve someone up.

This is where we add the 'cool' to this somewhat boring plot. See, throughout the entire movie, we've been able to peek inside the daily lives of two of Mantis' most loyal underlings, Boxers and Romeo. Incidentally, Romeo, with bleached hair and pink shirt, plays the best of parts. His girlfriend, Sherry, coaches Mantis on her way through sluttiness, her deepest conversations with Romeo being limited to 'shut up and do what I say, bitch' or 'ooh' and 'aah' and a variance thereof.

One of the recurring encounters Romeo has is with a local gang of pink-, blue-, and yellow-haired punks. The most sorry of this lot gets beaten up in a variety of ways whilst his friends leg it every time. Eventually, in a scene even I found somewhat sad, Romeo waits for his girlfriend to do the single nicest thing he's ever done - hide a ring in her rice - and he invariably runs into the rainbow-hair gang again. He treats them to a song, slaps the pink ranger around for a bit, but walks onto his knife. Romeo dies in Sherry's arms, his last words: 'you're so fucking pretty tonight'. Kind of charming.

Flash back to Mantis and the gang. They're pretty pissed off about their best man dying on them, and they blame the rival gang and Less-than-magic Johnson with the knives. They head over to their base, but get their asses kicked. Mantis arrives to help out, but being pregnant and all, she's not as legendary as she once was, so Mr. No-Boner gets his hands on her and, guess what, kicks her in the stomach for a bit of preemptive abortion.

Soo-il, by now familiar with the fact that his lovely wife is in fact a psycho gangster, is still a little bit pissed off about the whole ordeal, so decides to end this film and blows up the local karaoke parlor, and all the gangsters inside. Well, good for him.

After all, in this entire movie, he's been the only one to get bitch-slapped, raped, fooled, abused, AND married. I'd be less than happy, too.

Final rating: Three stars!
My Wife is a Gangster is a good watch. Although the real plot of the movie doesn't account for much, if porn can get away with it, so can the Koreans. Every other scene is one of Romeo and his entourage, which kept the whole thing flowing smooth like a lesbian jelly wrestling tournament. Reminiscent of the Germans, Soo-il ups the bodycount to 67 in the last few minutes of the game. Worthy.