The Art of Fighting Review

The Art of Fighting is a film that plays much better on second viewing once expectations have had a chance to adjust. This is a film that bears remarkably little resemblance to its marketing campaign, a film that plays things almost entirely straight despite a trailer that presents it as an off-kilter buddy picture and poster art featuring one of the leads levitating with a hand outstretched in benediction while the other mugs shamelessly for the camera. This begs the question: Is The Art of Fighting a misfire, a film that misses its mark almost entirely, or is it a case of misguided marketers trying to force a film into a box where it has no business being? While there are definitely some misses over the running time the answer is almost entirely the latter. Korea is, remember, the same country that tried to present genuinely bizarre and truly ingenius genre-buster Save the Green Planet as a standard romantic comedy and then reacted with shock when the film tanked.