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Riding
the coattails of a resurgence of interest in contemporary Asian
cinema is a handful of Korean imports including this raw but ultimately
entertaining story of four hard-ass thugs who rob a gas station
in the middle of the night and end up complicating their heist by
staying to earn more money pumping gas.
"Attack
the Gas Station!" reminds me a lot of cheap 80s urban indie
films in the rawness of the direction and apparent lack of budget.
Like a lot of those films, "Attack the Gas Station!" tries
to make up for it by sheer weight of entertainment. There's lots
of camp, low humour, fighting and even a musical number.
The
four thugs are paper-thin characters who could just as well not
have had backgrounds (though the director tries to show it in a
series of painfully earnest flashbacks). All are young, disaffected
and fast with their feet and fists. At first easily taking over
the gas station, the gang's take-no-shit attitudes begin drawing
an ever growing cast of characters into what is essentially a one-location
movie.
After robbing the first
few customers and storing them with their first group of prisoners
the group's boredom and swaggering manner run them afoul of gangsters,
the police and any customer who pisses them off. Each incident adds
more and more to their haul of prisoners.
Even given the single-location
shtick, there are easily a dozen subplots involving both gang and
prisoners, with most of them forgettable but one memorable sideplot
involves a group of high school punks who break into a musical number
that happens to be noticed by a passing record executive. Like I
said, really really silly.
Although this is not
usually a good comparison, the whole film feels like a Korean Wayan's
Bros. movie. Really stupid, sometimes funny, and not boring. It
sounds like a putdown but it's not. There's an energy in "Attack
the Gas Station!" that puts a smile on your face more times
than not. From the over-the-top performances to the chance-taking
direction, "Attack the Gas Station!" throws a lot up on
the screen. Some of it sticks and some of it stinks.
On DVD.
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