Have you ever watched a Coen Brothers film, especially a Coen Brothers western, and thought, “Man, this is great and all, but I wish it took place in Korea and featured Korean characters?” Suppose you said yes to that hypothetical question, Mash Ville may be the film for you as it is precisely how I described: a Coen Brothers-inspired Korean neo-western dark comedy film involving a gang of whisky-makers, an alcoholic make-up and special effects artist, two members of a gun-obsessed cult, and a psychotic police officer on a morally righteous path of justice.
Like the Coen’s more absurdist, darkly comedic films like Fargo, The Big Lebowski, and Burn After Reading, Mash Ville is a very whacky, goofy, almost Looney Tunes-esque film that doesn’t concern itself with creating a coherent narrative. The movie is more interested in being as fun and over-the-top as possible, and while its shtick did become exhausting by the last half hour, I can’t help but admit that I was, for the most part, consistently entertained.
However, the movie does have an overarching plot as it follows a large ensemble of characters who don’t appear to have any connection with each other at first, but as they get themselves wrapped up in the shenanigans of two dangerous cultists who seemingly shoot people in sight, their storylines begin intertwining until; eventually, everyone reaches the same destination. It’s an ambitious idea for a movie like other equally ambitious epics with large casts of characters and intertwining storylines like Magnolia or Pulp Fiction.
While Mash Ville is nowhere near as great as those films I just mentioned, it is still an enjoyable movie cut from the same cloth. At the end of the day, though, while there are deep narrative hooks and thematic ideas that audiences can take away if they look hard enough, the plot is simply an excuse to get the characters from one whacky scenario to the next. It prioritizes being as amusing as possible, and I respect that.
Mash Ville is easily one of the more entertaining films I watched during this year’s festival, and a lot of that entertainment can be chalked up to its gags and set pieces. The best thing I can say about the film is that it fully commits to its whacky comedic bits, regardless of how violent or strange they may seem. Regardless of the context, both the writing and performances go all-in on delivering these gags and comedic stunts in the most over-the-top way, and while each moment of humor doesn’t always land, the ones that do hit hard. In some ways, Mash Ville is like a better version of A Million Ways to Die in the West because, unlike the latter film, which fails at being both a comedy and a Western, Mash Ville manages to take these more traditional Western motifs and tropes like the rugged desert terrain and the lawless moral ambiguity of the characters and use them to catapult a series of silly scenarios and jokes that would have made Edgar Wright or Mel Brooks proud.
However, what ultimately holds this film back from being “good” is its absurdly long runtime. The film has an over two hour runtime, and not only is this length completely unjustified, but it also hurt my viewing experience. As I mentioned in the beginning, I was just about ready for the film to be over by the time there were about 30 minutes of movie left. As fun as Mash Ville is, its whacky, crazy charm can only work for so long before eventually becoming exhausting. Perhaps if the film had a more compelling story or more interesting characterization, then I would have been more patient to sit through the long runtime, but as it is, this movie overstays its welcome and doesn’t know when to quit. Had the script shaved off a bit of fat and tightened up the pacing, this could have been a fun, breezy 90-minute-ish long Western comedy filled to the brim with fun set pieces.
However, even with these flaws, Mash Ville is still a mostly fun time that I highly recommend you watch if this sounds like your kind of fun. While I probably won’t be revisiting Mash Ville anytime soon, I did like this enough that I am incredibly keen to see what else this director, Hwang Wook, cooks up next.
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