Review of For the Emperor (2014) by Jason K — 10 Sep 2015

First things first, the description for this film is completely messed up. The description, as quoted from Netflix, is as follows: 'A disgraced ex-baseball player enjoys climbing the ranks of a loan shark mob, but goes to war against the ruthless boss when the woman he loves vanishes.

' Sounds like a South Korean movie all right, they have to include a romantic subplot in there, to appeal to the fairer sex, even though the romance itself is practically nonexistent. I swear, the only character development between these two as a couple are two sex scenes.

One of the sex scenes is exceedingly long. Somehow they think that a long sex scenes means that a deeper emotional connection is being built between these two. Nope. That's not how it works. That's never how it works.

Other than that there's literally nothing. And it's not like the two have much chemistry to begin with during the scenes they're not fucking each other. Min-ki Lee is honestly just not that good of an actor honestly.

He simply doesn't know how to emote. He has no facial expression other than pissed off all the time and his delivery isn't much better. It makes buying into him as a lead character difficult. Not to mention that his story, outside of the two sex scenes with the woman he loves, isn't any good and doesn't really follow any logical story progression.

It's not that the film is that complex, it's just that they do such a poor job at setting everything up and then paying off on it in a satisfactory fashion, that if you miss out on one scene then you'd be lost for the rest of the film.

Perhaps it's not that you're lost, it's that sometimes the progression seems to be out of nowhere. Sometimes the lead would just be talking to his boss and then the next scene he'd be betraying him to the cops.

Like there would be no setup for this whatsoever. There's pointless twists and betrayals that come out of nowhere. It's honestly a poorly written movie on pretty much every front. I honestly have no idea what the film was supposed to be about, in the long run.

It goes all over the place, has poorly written characters, is poorly acted, from the lead actor at least, and perhaps the only redeeming thing about might be the fact that some of the 'action' scenes themselves are so ridiculously bloody.

Because why the fuck not, right? It's not like it really redeems the film that much but, out of everything, that's the only thing they do right. With that out of the way, this movie is honestly terrible.

There's little-to-no good in this film, so, yea, it's really bad.