The Childe
One of the things I’ve enjoyed about getting into more Asian action films from the past few years is how they feel like a relic from a bygone era in American cinema. None has felt more like that than Park Hoon-jung’s “The Childe,” which could be made in the ’80s or ’90s from the same basic script by Simpson-Bruckheimer or Richard Donner and feel fairly similar. The last film of Hoon-jung’s I’d seen was “The Witch 2: The Other One,” and that was good, but this feels more comfortable as a piece of genre storytelling. It’s got a simple hook, energetic action and too-complicated character relationships that will play out in unexpected ways over the course of the film.
The film’s main focus is Marco (Kang Tae-Ju), an underground Pilipino boxer who’s trying to raise money so his mother can get a life-saving surgery. Right away, there’s something cleanly simple about the script by Hoon-jung that doesn’t complicate the stakes for our main character. Marco gets himself into scrapes, and he’s unable to get the money he needs. He didn’t really know his father- a Korean businessman- and wants to try and find him and see if that can help. A family friend claims to have found him, and he goes to South Korea. On the trip, he meets a stranger (Kim Seon-Ho) who seems friendly enough, but also seems to know more than he’s letting on. Once Marco lands in Korea, he finds himself a very hot commodity, including by the stranger.
I think it’s because the script is so streamlined narratively and thematically that I enjoyed “The Childe” as much as I have any action film in a long time. Tae-Ju is the type of star that convinces us that he can both take care of himself physically while also taking an insane beating, while Seon-Ho gives off a different vibe completely. It’s not explicitly complimentary, but it works in being able to give us two very different main characters to bounce off of. The reason for Marco’s “welcome” to Korea also feels very straightforward, not just being a case of the rich hoping to take something from the poor for their own means, but it also gives us a chance to watch Marco put up against a wall both physically and emotionally. This reminded me of the Jet Li film “Unchained” in that way, but obviously with a different hook, and one that “The Childe” sells very well.
“The Childe” has some terrific bursts of action that were a great reminder that most of the best action movies were not just about spectacle and constant thrills. Fill in the plot in between the action, and suddenly I might have a story- and characters- I care about, and engage with. This might be one of the best examples of that I’ve seen in recent years.
