Review: Arahan.

Arahan is an action comedy directed by Ryoo Seung-wan and stars his brother Ryoo Seung-bum in the lead along with Yoon So-yi, Ahn Sung-ki and Jung Doo-hong.

The movie revolves around the inept-yet-fiery cop Sang-hwan (Ryoo Seung-bum) who, after being discovered by the 7 (in reality 5) powerful Tao Masters (led by Ahn Sung-ki), is trained to be the next great warrior due to his extraordinary Qi within him.

When I went into Arahan, I fully expected it to be a slightly less humorous version of Kung Fu Hustle (as I think I had vaguely remembering read so on one review), and while I did draw similarities between the two throughout, Arahan stands on its own quite well.

This movie is genuinely funny, in the subtle kind of way, the one off lines ("If you're called the 7 Powerful Masters, but there's only 5 of you shouldn't you be called the-" "Power Rangers?" "Yes! Or...") flow naturally into the dialogue, the gags are, while pretty obvious (i.e a beat up thug looking at Sang-hwan in fear before getting launched out of a window), don't feel too forced, and the actual fighting manages to balance the action and the humor pretty well without feeling like an emulation of other action comedies of the time.

It does get really awkward in the beginning (as do all comedies), but the humor outweighed the cringe which I think is more important.

The action is great too, it's very clearly inspired by wuxia films, a large portion of the film is really, but the action is easily one of the best parts of the film. Each proper fight is entertaining, it's clear they went all out on it as the last 10-15 minutes is just one really long multi-round fight scene. There's a lot of build up before the first real fight scene but it's really worth it in the end.

Something that actually really surprised me is the character development Sang-hwan goes through, usually in these Zero-to-Hero stories (the ones I'm familiar with at least) it takes until the very end of the film for them to have actually become competent through their training, but in Arahan he actually becomes competent halfway through the film.

They only show his training through a decent-length montage, but the results are clear immediately. He can actually fight by the first hour of the film, and his personality is a little better than before, less whining at least.

And I really enjoyed Ryoo Seung-bum's performance, Sang-hwan overall felt not only really natural but really relatable to me, he had the vibe of a temperamental young adult down. I'm not saying I saw myself in his performance, but I could see myself in his performance in the future.

Another thing I really appreciate about this film is that it knows when to drop the comedy and get serious, not that all of the serious scenes are good, but unlike other action comedies I've seen (Enter the Fat Dragon) it actually knows when it's time to stop being funny.

Whenever the villain, Heuk-woon, is on screen the film transforms from a light-hearted comedy to a thriller border-line horror kinda tone, the shift was so dramatic that the first time it happened I was like "Is this, is this even a comedy film????" And I thought I got bait-and-switched honestly.

Arahan is, in my opinion, what I think Bulletproof Monk could've been. It's a good action film, a good comedy, a light-hearted film with a good performance from both protagonist and antagonist. I do think it's just a bit too long, though.

I personally recommend it to fans of the Zero-to-Hero trope, fans of Action Comedies and finally, Wuxia fans.

That's all for now, Love and Peace!