Country: Korea
Genre: Comedy/ Action
Director: Jin-gyu Cho
Year: 2001
Rating: 
TRASH CINEMA RECOMMENDED MOVIE
In my experience, Korean women have a tendency to be more coarse and blunt than most other Southeast Asian women. I wouldn’t want to piss one off. Now, imagine the most lowclass, least feminine version of the species. You’ve just met Cha Eun-jin (Eun-Kyung Shin), a legendary female gangster with mad fighting skills.
Cha Eun-jin’s beloved sister, Sheri (Eun-ju Choi), is dying of cancer. Her last request? That Cha Eun-jin marry and have children.
In between martial arts battles and other assorted gangster business, Cha Eun-jin goes through the motions of finding a mate, and settles on Kang Su-il (a very amusing Sang-Myeon Park), a clueless and jolly civil servant.
Most of the comedy in My Wife Is A Gangster comes from the interactions between Kang Su-il and Cha Eun-jin. Kang Su-il is doing his best to be a good husband. Cha Eun-jin can barely be bothered to try. Their wedding portrait tells you everything you need to know. Kang Su-il gazes beatifically off into the middle distance while Cha Eun-jin glares at the photographer.
One interesting aspect of My Wife Is A Gangster is the sociological subtext. Clearly, the dying sister wants Cha Eun-jin to become a “real woman,” which she can only be if she’s married and pregnant. It’s like America back in the 50s or something.
The juxtaposition of the gangster tropes with the sociological comedy is consistently funny, but does My Wife Is A Gangster work as an action piece? Less so.
I was really worried when the first scene unfolded. Director Jin-gyu Cho films a battle with knives and clubs in very stylized fashion, almost strobed, so the motion is blurred. It becomes clear later that his purpose was to mythologize Cha Eun-jin, but at the time it seemed like Jin-gyu Cho was avoiding having to do the hard work of good action choreography.
Fortunately, towards the end of the movie, we get some decent fight choreography, but that’s really not the focus of My Wife Is A Gangster.
My Wife Is A Gangster is really a character based comedy, mixed with some effective Three Stooges style pratfalls, crossed with a satire of gangster movies. That’s a hard mix to pull off, but My Wife Is A Gangster manages it, at least until the denouement, which manages to surprise us, but only at the expense of betraying one of the main characters.
My Wife Is A Gangster is not a great film, but I laughed alot, probably because Cha Eun-jin reminds me of my wife and her poor husband reminds me of my brother-in-law.
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