Parasite is NOT GOOD [SPOILERS]
I shocked my Instagram feed yesterday when I wrote “NOT GOOD” after seeing Bong Joon-ho’s latest film Parasite. I guess you could say I fooled everyone, like the Ki-taek family, who take advantage of their son (Choi Woo-sik) tutoring a rich, privileged family, as they scam the entire family in hiring the Ki-taeks, by eliminating the employees who work there with elaborate schemes. It’s not until the second act of the film that Parasite elevates from a fun comedy to a fantastic thriller, until the third act shits all over the Joon-ho’s brilliant script. Yes, I enjoyed Parasite, but not as much as everyone who LAUDED the film, calling it a “masterpiece” or using elongated adjectives to say one simple thing.
Joon-ho’s film is filled with so many twists and surprises, that it’s hard to talk about the film without spoiling. So I’ll give one final warning before I dive deep into the nitty gritty of Parasite. SPOILER ALERT, I CANNOT STRESS IT ENOUGH. Even if you don’t care about spoilers, this is really a movie to see COLD, without KNOWING JACK MOTHERFUCKING SHIT! You good? Ok boomers, let’s go.
The first act of the film is rather simple, commended by fantastic performances. The best part about the movie isn’t the script, it’s the acting. All of the actors do high-calibre and convincing performances, especially Lee Jung-eun who, after getting fired by the Park family(after being the victim of an elaborate Peach scheme by the Ki-taeks to replace the housekeeper with Kim (Song Kang-ho)’s wife (Chang Hyae-jin)), will return to the Park house to retreive something she forgot. We’ll talk about that soon. But her performance, from that point up to her death is phenomenal. When she impersonated Ri Chun Hee, I was rolling on the floor. The impersonation is so spot-on that I couldn’t breathe. I was laughing so goddamn hard I believe it made the entire audience uncomfortable. It was perfect. Every performance should be celebrated with a slew of awards. Everyone here is at the top of their game, mostly Jung-eun and Song Kang-ho who are the film’s highlights. I also loved the “innocent, rich, gullible wife” portrayed by Cho Yeo-jong, who will fall for literally ANYTHING the Ki-taek says because their son (Choi Woo-sik) has a connection with the previous tutor. It’s incredible. It is done in the vein of many great con capers. Frank Oz’s classic Dirty Rotten Scoundrels come to mind, but also Glenn Ficarra and John Requa’s masterpiece, Focus.
The second act of the film is where the film goes in a completely different direction than you initially think and is where I went “wow” in the audience. When the former housekepper (Jung-eun) wants to pickup something she forgot, it is revealed (weirdly) that she is hiding her HUSBAND (Park Myung-hoon) in the bunker of the house. Joon-ho does a Rian Johnson and completely subverts your expectations by twisting your initial ideas of the film’s script in your head and leaving you gobsmacked. Then, she [accidentally] finds out that they are a family scamming the Parks. This is where the film’s best sequence, a complete 10/10, comes into play. A fantastic mix of comedy, action and tension brilliantly written by Joon-ho. It’s one of the best scripted sequences of the year, and fantastically exceuted. Every step taken in that sequence is as exciting as the last one. It’s pure Bong Joon-ho and I couldn’t believe what was happening on screen. The sole reason why Parasite is to be seen in theaters is to see the 2nd act come to fruition in a wonderfully staged sequence. The Ri Chun Hee impersonation, the bumbling, slapstick-style action, wonderful camerawork, and fantastic suspense is present when the Parks come back home and the Ki-taek are hiding in plain sight. It’s classic cinema reinvented for a contemporary audience. Then, I said to myself, “surely the movie can’t get any better than this!” I was right.
The third act is a big drop in quality. After experiencing one of the best elongated sequences of the year (2nd to the “Time Heist” in Avengers: Endgame), Parasite slows down and, unfortunately, drops its momentum by having difficulty finding out what to say (or do) afterwards. The Ki-taek house gets flooded (OK, I guess?), and then there is an impromptu party for Da-song (Jun Hyeon-jon). The impromptu party sequence has some great moments, like when Kim Ki-woo (Woo-shik) attempts to kill Moon-gwang’s husband with a rock, but gets strangled by a rope and tries to escape with the rope on his neck. The way the film builds-up suspense and tension in that particular moment is incredible. Then, the husband comes out of the bunker and tries to stab Kim, but fails at accomplishing his goal (aside from killing the sister, Kim Ki-jeong (Park So-dam)). Kim leaves the house after stabbing Park Dong-ik (Lee Sun-kyun) and it is revealed, in one of the most unnecessary epilogues I’ve seen in so goddamn long, that he was hidden in the bunker all along, and that’s why the police couldn’t find him! From the get go, the epilogue is incredibly predictable, but also incredibly unnecessary. I was trying to figure out exactly what place the epilogue has in the movie, and I couldn’t find one reason to, aside from maybe stretching the runtime a bit. The epilogue does give a bit of “closure” to the story, but what if the fate of Kim was to be ambiguous? It, in my opinion, would’ve worked out so much better than “Look, son! I’m in the bunker!” The morse code is hilarious, everything is done so conveniently with so many throwaway lines that explains the son being in the house at the convenient moment the father is playing with a light and transmits a morse code. How does he know his son hasn’t moved on from his father’s disappearance? How does he know the son will be at the house as soon as he transmits a morse code? And how does he know morse? The throaway line explaining Ki-woo knowing morse is hilarious, because it’s so convenient. The ending that ends with a Ki-woo writing a letter to his dad, saying that he will become rich to buy the house and free his father adds fake-closure, as being rich is only a pipe-dream for Ki-woo. The flood sequence was incredibly dull, and pointless, as it adds nothing to the understanding of the Ki-taeks or never deepens their arc, compared to the previous brilliant sequence, then the party sequence has some form of excitement by a 1-minute foot chase, until the quality brings down to untintentionally hilarious schlock with a stabbing rampage, and an epilogue that’s as unnecessary as the multiple endings of Peter Jackson’s The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. I wasn’t particularly drawn to the ending of Parasite, compared to the slew of critics who hail it as a masterpiece.
Parasite is still a compelling thriller, if the ending would’ve been more exciting, it would’ve been an all-time great thriller. But it isn’t. It’s still pretty darn good, due to its excellent first and second acts, and then falls apart completely with a mediocre third act that left me a little perplexed. Oh well, those performances are MONEY, the second act is MONEY, the third act is MEDIOCRE. It’s great Bong Joon-ho, not PHENOMENAL Bong Joon-ho, like his previous efforts, Snowpiercer and Okja.
✯✯✯✯
