Review of Daisy (2006) by Jesse O — 16 May 2013

This is like a love triangle version of Romeo and Juliet. So you can expect tragedy, pretty much, for the three main characters. I found the movie to be sentimental and melodramatic right from the very beginning, but it's actually not as overbearing, at least until the ending comes along, for a majority of the film.

But the way the characters are written and the individual love stories are handled the film was meant to be sentimental. The problem is that I really didn't find the love stories themselves to be all that interesting really.

I suppose the idea of this woman falling in love with someone, that she thinks, left her daisies and built a bridge for her, anonymously, so she could cross is good enough, but they don't really explore how the cop leads her to believe that he was the guy who did all these nice things for her.

You don't really get a sense that this woman loves this cop for more than just what he did for her, so that's poor character development. There's no real connection there, so it's a little hard to buy that this couple was madly in love with each other.

Of course after the cop is murdered, you get to see her relationship with the hitman and how that develops. This isn't really any better, because the hitman, while some of the stuff he did was really nice, he was really a glorified stalker until the girl is shot, and loses her voice, and the cop returns to Korea.

But I thought this relationship was a little bit better since Jung Woo-sung, the hitman, is very talented and has a very likable presence about him. It's easier to get into his part of the story than it is the cop's.

But I did think that the aspect of it being a cop and a hitman felt forced. Like somehow they wanted a guarantee that none of the main characters would end up alive. Again, it just felt incredibly forced because it doesn't really add anything to the movie other than to give men who hate romance flicks something to be distracted by.

And, as mentioned, to ensure that nobody in the movie survived. I did like the performances, nothing to complain about there. Even if, again, they weren't greatly developed characters that they hoped to make up for with the use of rampant sentimentality.

They use the score of the film to manipulate your feelings. It's not as bad as I've seen in other films but I do think they were using the score to tell the audience what to feel. I thought this movie was, until the climax, about 2.

5 stars. Not good, not bad, just average. The ending brought that rating down to 2 stars because, again, it was too tragic to truly be effective storytelling. You didn't really get a sense that any of the two couples were as in love as the movie would have you believe, solid acting be damned.

I didn't really dislike the movie as much as the rating implies, it just went slightly downhill at the end. Unbelievable romances, constant sentimentality (though not as much as I see in a lot of Korean movies, even if the film was shot by a director from Hong Kong) and forced action sequences make this a below than average experience.