His period chamber piece The Showdown (2011) was an inauspicious start, while his modern gangster hit New World (2013) was a tightly scripted affair boasting a on-point cast, but his latest, which sees him working on his largest canvas to date, may actually suffer from the opposite problem. In the past, there have been those who have championed Park Hong-joon as a scriptwriter (his credits include Ryoo Seung-wan's The Unjust and Kim Jee-woon's I Saw the Devil, both 2010) while dismissing him as a director.
The almost mythical beast of the title (which Chun believes to be a mountain god) has an uncanny ability to differentiate between nationalities, and while he mauls anyone that comes in his path, it is the Japanese oppressors for which he reserves his most savage attacks. A 'great tiger' (the title of the film in Korean) stands against the might of the evil Japanese empire, with Chun acting as a reluctant participant until he forges his own path.įollowing Roaring Currents and other recent hits Ode to My Father and Northern Limit Line (and perhaps even The Himalayas, which opens on the same day), The Tiger sadly follows a pattern of historical revisionism that has become mainstream in contemporary Korean cinema. While the above synopsis is simplistic, and glosses over much of what happens in the first hour, by the time the second (and better) half comes into focus, this is essentially where the narrative stands. Along with other local hunters, Chun is charged by a Japanese commander with hunting down the last remaining tiger on the peninsula in Jirisan (now a national park in Southern Korea). Following the record-breaking success of Roaring Currents, Choi Min-sik returns to screens in another big-budget period epic, this time hunting down the last Korean tiger (as opposed to the last tiger in Korea, because this feline clearly has a national identity) in Park Hong-joon's end-of-year release The Tiger.Ĭhun Man-duk is a hunter in early 20th century Korea, training his son to follow in his footsteps during the Japanese colonial period.