"Acting is just faking" says a young and uprising gangster to a diva-like actor when they meet in an exclusive bar/restaurant near the beginning of "Rough Cut". The later surrounded by the controversy of his spoiled attitude on movie sets, the first dealing with a gang that has their main leader in jail. Their paths will cross once more, now as partners acting in the same movie, a crime action thriller, but under one condition: all their fight scenes must be real.
The premise of the film is quite interesting, an exploration of the movie-making process taken from the perspective of two young visceral men. The first half kept me quite interested, but after that things seem to fell apart under the weight of too many useless sub-plots that never go anywhere. We have the secret girlfriend of the actor, who he always hides from the press. Then there's an attempt of blackmail done to him, and then we have the gangster and the usual mafia problems that one has seen in almost every movie of the genre. At the end, i felt all this added little or nothing to the main plot that the movie was suppose to be trying to deal with. We see the characters go through a lot of stuff, but we never really get to know them well, and neither of these events seem to resonate in a logic way. The gangster start to gets soft because....because the script seems to want just that without any further development.
The acting is quite solid, and don't let the pretty boys that they put on the lead roles mislead you to think that this was just a teenage-girl bait. Mind you, i bet they did wanted a bit of that, but they do the best they can with the unfocused script they got. Rough Cut is not a total waste of time, but i just can't help to feel that it was such a wasted opportunity to tell a better story. Kim Ki Duk's involvement with the script might explain the problems, starting with that stupid rape scene. Playing the shock trick once more mr Kim? Grow up already, you look like Korea's Lars Von Trier when you do that.
The premise of the film is quite interesting, an exploration of the movie-making process taken from the perspective of two young visceral men. The first half kept me quite interested, but after that things seem to fell apart under the weight of too many useless sub-plots that never go anywhere. We have the secret girlfriend of the actor, who he always hides from the press. Then there's an attempt of blackmail done to him, and then we have the gangster and the usual mafia problems that one has seen in almost every movie of the genre. At the end, i felt all this added little or nothing to the main plot that the movie was suppose to be trying to deal with. We see the characters go through a lot of stuff, but we never really get to know them well, and neither of these events seem to resonate in a logic way. The gangster start to gets soft because....because the script seems to want just that without any further development.
The acting is quite solid, and don't let the pretty boys that they put on the lead roles mislead you to think that this was just a teenage-girl bait. Mind you, i bet they did wanted a bit of that, but they do the best they can with the unfocused script they got. Rough Cut is not a total waste of time, but i just can't help to feel that it was such a wasted opportunity to tell a better story. Kim Ki Duk's involvement with the script might explain the problems, starting with that stupid rape scene. Playing the shock trick once more mr Kim? Grow up already, you look like Korea's Lars Von Trier when you do that.