The Tiger: An Old Hunter's Tale

Set in 1925 Korea, as the Japanese Governor is trying to eradicate the last of the native tigers as a symbol of the futility of resistance to their rule. There was one family of tigers left, but after the hunters killed the mother and her cubs, the Mountain Lord is on the hunt. . . for vengeance!

The local hunters, and even the Japanese Army, are helpless against the giant tiger, who kills dozens of them, including the son of the local master hunter, retired for many years, Chun Man-duk. Now perhaps Chun Man-duk desires vengeance. Or maybe not.

The movie has a gradual pace, long periods of setting things up, conversations building the foundation towards an inevitable end. Scenes of the Mountain Lord watching over its dead kits, flashbacks to Chun Man-duk's past. Then the brief segments of action and violence. It's not a bad way to build a movie, mimics hunting to a certain extent. All the time spent preparing, tracking the prey, and if it's done right, the kill is comparatively quick.

And that build-up works. It allows for the problems between Chun and his son's life in the mountains to grow, to see Gu-kyung's determined, calculated pursuit of the tiger, and checks in on the Japanese who are pushing the whole thing. All good.

Then the action starts, and you have a big CGI tiger running around, shrugging off bullets and ripping dudes' arms off. The build up is distinctly Jaws in style, but the payoff is more like one of those Syfy movies. Sharktopus, or whatever. People running and screaming and being slaughtered in droves by CGI.

The Japanese attempt to overwhelm the tiger is meant to seem costly and futile, and maybe that means you need the body count. The scenes just feel at odds with the rest of the movie, but that could be my perception of what the film was trying to be. I might need to view the Mountain Lord killing the Japanese soldiers through the same lens folks in the U.S. view movies where a bunch of stinkin' Nazis get killed. I'm pretty sure the Japanese occupation of the Korean peninsula was not a happy time for Koreans, so I should be taking that into account.