I have been wanting to see this movie since it came out, but the Korean DVD didn’t have English subs so it took me till now to check it out. I think there had been too much build up for me to really love this film. I saw it because I heard about the amazing comic book action, and yes this film does have it, but the film isn’t shot very well, and the story isn’t the best, trying to fit in video game action and story-lines into a film, and to make a normal Korean youth with a dead end job who loves video games to become an action hero. It is a cool idea, but doesn’t have a good enough story, or good enough acting to really pull it off well.

Kim Hyun-sung (김현성) plays Joo, a loser of a man who works as a delivery boy, and plays video games in all of his spare time. His best friend Lee (Kim Hin Pyo) is a professional video game player, and gets all the girls, before getting work for the system. Joo is in love with a girl who works at the local video game parlor he hangs out at (Lim Eun-kyeong 임은경)), but he is too shy, and even when he tries to talk to her, she gets picked up, but then he sees her as the Little Match Girl, a girl selling matches who in a poem died out in the cold alone, and gets invited to play a live action video game, where it is real life, and the point is to save the Little Match Girl from being killed by many of the other players, and get her to fall in love in him, and then let her die, so that he wins, but he doesn’t let her die, and ends up giving her a virus.

REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS...

She ends up taking his gun and killing anyone from the system (the ones running the game who are now after Joo), but they manage to capture her again before she can kill herself with the help of Joo. Joo has run into the maker of the system, who has helped him out, and he gives him a weapon and tells him what to do to get into the system. And with the help of a crazy supposed lesbian (looks like a bad ass transsexual to me), who initially taught him what to do, and helps him get into the system. He manages to get in with the mackerel gun that the creator of the system gave him, and make it farther than anyone has, but the little match girl has been reprogrammed, and he is killed, and ends up back in the real world, seeing the real girl who works at the game shop, and going back to work as a delivery boy, and the movie ends, or does it. And he tries again, and instead gives the Match Girl the lighter she sold him to begin with that got him into the game, and it sparks her memory and she grabs a gun, and the two of them destroy the system and end up on an island somewhere with a child where she has no memory of the past, but they got money from the system.

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Huh? Not a very cohesive or well done story if you ask me. Why is the little match girl just like the real girl. Is it only a game, or is it real? No questions are answered, and the film isn’t shot too well. A good popcorn film, but not too special.