Jeon Ji-hyeon’s return to the screen in a very different role, and shows off her acting chops in this drama, and she is damn good in it too. A very different role, and she really does know how to move an audience. I hope she keeps making movies Korea, because I am sure Blood the Last Vampire won’t make her the big Hollywood star she deserves to be (though what is up with her US name Gianna?). This film is very well done an enjoyable, and you really start to care for these characters, and I love the moments of hallucination that don’t really happen, but you see them as if they are real. This really is a must see, especially for all Jeon Ji-hyeon fans, where she shows off her acting chops.

Jeon Ji-hyeon (전지현) is Song Soo-jeong, a fast talking, chain smoking producer of feel good television pieces, who is willing to do anything for the shot, and whose hair is falling out to prove it. She hates people so bad, she wants to quite and go shoot in Africa, but that is spoiled, when one of the crew in Africa gets hits by a lion. She then meets a strange, and crazy man, who thinks he is Superman [Hwang Jeong-min (황정민)] who has lost his powers because of a piece of kryptonite implanted in his brain. He is obviously crazy, but he spends his time helping people, and befriending a small child. Soo-jeong starts to film Superman and his life, but she also starts to change.

REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS….

The Region 3 Disc is available at YesAsia.

After she has finished filming, she and her team go out and get drunk, but Superman shoes up at her place, and somehow manages to get in, and get her to go out, and she keeps filming him, though she already had enough footage. And eventually she befriends him enough, that he takes her to house in a an abandoned building where he plays with the small girl [Jin Ji-hee (진지희)] and has an incredible garden on his roof. She also sees he is having strange seizures that hurt him badly, and she gets him to a doctor, who sees something in his brain, though he freaks out not wanting to be in the hospital.

Eventually she manages to figure out who he was, a man who had been in a car accident with his family, and no one had helped and his wife and child had survived. She finds out which hospital he was in, and she tricks him and gets them to take him back in.

Quickly Soo-jeong finds out about Superman, who in fact as a child lost his father in the May 18th incident in Gwangju and was also shot in the head then by a sniper, and has had seizures since then, and been treated there, then after the accident he lost it.

At the hospital they put him on medication so that he quickly no longer feels emotion, and no longer cares, and no longer has a desire to help people, and he is able to be released, but is now a very different person, no longer wanting to help people. And Soo-jeong gets really depressed, because she has now rid the world of Superman.

Things don’t last well for him though, as he sees a mugging, and goes towards the woman who was stabbed and gets blood on his hands, and loses it, not helping the woman, and the police think he is a suspect, and want to gun him down, but are stopped by Soo-jeong, before he runs away.

There is then a car accident and a gas explosion, and Soo-jeong from her office recognizes the place, and rushes there, and finds a major accident, and the man is now Superman again, as he wants to run into the building, where his friend the small girl is trapped. Soo-jeong tries to stop him, because they both know he is not superman, but he goes anyway, first rescuing the mom, and then going back in for the little girl, but gets trapped by the fire. Finally he decides to jump with the little girl or they will both die.

We see Superman fly the little girl to the ground, and save the day, and Soo-jeong film him, and then he flies off, proving he is Superman, then we see reality, and he jumped and stopped the fall of the girl with his body, and she was saved. And he lays on the ground dyeing, but he sees the Kryptonite come out his head before he dies, so he dies smiling and happy.

And Soo-jeong is changed, as we see her help an old woman with her things at a train station, she no longer hates people or the world.

••••

A really good film, if quite sad. Well performed, written, directed and shot. A powerful and moving piece about how people no longer help anyone else, really one of the better films of the year. A must see all the way around.