[HanCinema's Film Review] "Big Match"

On paper, "Big Match" should have been one of the bigger releases of 2014. The big budget blockbuster features Lee Sung-jae as Ik-ho, a mixed martial artist with a bad temper that gets worse when he loses his shot at a world championship because his opponent fails a drug test. If this sounds more like the premise to a sports film than an action film, well, that might be part of the reason why "Big Match" only managed about a million viewers at the box office.

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The premise is a bit convoluted, and also by sheer anachronistic coincidence parallels "Squid Game" albeit not in a very helpful way. Ik-ho's brother Yeong-ho (played by Lee Sung-min) is kidnapped by Ace (played by Shin Ha-kyun), who bullies Ik-ho into participating in epic action setpieces against cops and gangsters so he can earn a commission off the bets made by high profile clients. This doesn't really have anything to do with the premise I described in the first paragraph, you might have noticed.

So not only is most of the exposition of the first act irrelevant, so are the characters. Ra Mi-ran has ridiculous stage presence as Yeong-ho's wife, to the point that I was left wondering whether she had a significantly more important role in an earlier version of the script. New characters introduced over the course of Ace's manipulating Ik-ho simply don't have her energy. Soo-kyeong (played by BoA) is the red angel who's supposed to help move Ik-ho from place to place, and is treated as if she's more important than just a typical henchperson, but never really gets past that point.

The action scenes are good, at least, although they awkwardly suffer from being too intense. In general, an action movie wants to have the intensity of its action scenes slowly ramp up to the climax. But when Ik-ho's opening scenes involve him fighting off an entire police station handcuffed...well, there's not really anywhere to escalate from that. Nothing is ever really a credible threat to Ik-ho physically, and Ace's borderline magical hacking infrastructure always contrives a means to overwhelm Ik-ho anyway.

The result is that "Big Match" is both a very long and very arbitrarily paced movie that never really seems to go anywhere, and keeps delivering big climaxes only to assert that no, the movie's still not over yet. The cumulative effect of this is that when Ik-ho does, eventually, finally, succeed, it's less because he's learned anything or solved a puzzle as it is because the script finally just ended. He's just not a compelling protagonist.

It's not like Lee Jung-jae can't do action. He's frequently quite compelling in action roles, but "Big Match" proves that Lee Jung-jae is only ever as good as his direction, and can't carry a movie on his own without good co-stars to play off of. Even Bae Sung-woo, an often strong supporting actor, is surprisingly generic here as Axe, a gang leader who runs afoul of our hero. "Big Match" isn't explicitly bad so much as it is unremarkable.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Big Match" is directed by Choi Ho, and features Lee Jung-jae, Shin Ha-kyun, Lee Sung-min, BoA, Kim Eui-sung, Bae Sung-woo. Release date in Korea: 2014/11/27.