A dark crime comedy of the blackest variety, The Humanist follows the bungled kidnaping plot of a privileged young man named Tea-ho (Jae-mo Ahn). A deadly mix of spoiled and demented, Tae-ho begrudges his wealthy real estate mogul father for giving Tae-ho a small allowance, shacking up with and marrying his former secretary, and, after he failed at college, forcing Tae-ho to go into military service. When Tae-ho accidentally kills a cop and is blackmailed, he needs money more than ever to keep from going to jail. He decides to have his father kidnaped, keeping the bulk of the ransom money to pay off his blackmailer, and hopes that by being the one taking charge of getting his father safely returned, Tae-ho will gain his father's favor.

Tae-ho ropes this two best friends, the homicidal eunuch Euglena (Seong-Jin Kang) and the dumb childlike brute Amoeba (Sang-myeon Park) into the scheme, which naturally, goes very, very wrong. Wrinkles in the plan pop up, from fender benders, to hick talking nuns, to mistaken identity, and cell phone problems, and in the end, the trio of friends, tight since childhood, find themselves turning on each other.

Evidenced in this film and his follow-up A Bizarre Love Triangle, Mu-yeong Lee really likes offbeat comedy. Despite his involvement with Chan-woo Park, Lee's features don't have the same sense of operatic feel both in terms of story structure and tone and his direction which doesn't have the technical dazzle associated with Park's work.

While you would definitely tag this as a comedy, I, despite my distinctly black sense of humor, didn't find many laughs. There is a fine line between black comedy that is mean-spirited and dark and black comedy that is just plain repugnant and displeasurable. For instance, Amoeba, who is a character in the Lennie from Of Mice and Men vein, is first just seen as a big, childlike-dumb brute. But, then he asks if he can rape the nun he and Eugenla have taken hostage because she spotted them during the kidnaping. Yeah, doesn't sound very funny, yet it is meant to be. The scene plays further with his premature ejaculating (c'mon, laugh) and wanting to put off burying the nun alive until he can actually rape her (see, its funny cause he's all dumb and awkward, right?). Monty Python's Black Knight refusing to acknowledge his dismemberment as a drawback is the kind of gruesome humor I can get behind, not the innocent cop in The Humanist getting killed via auto accident which results in his Wile E. Coyotelike flying through the air until his head violently smacks into a road barricade.

Not finding the comedy very amusing, I was left to pick the film apart for further flaws. First, the casting is spotty agewise: the trio of friends are supposed to be early-mid 20's but appear more like guys in the mid-30's (Amoeba HAS to be near, if not, 40 yrs old), and Tae-ho's trophy wife stepmother isnt really that young. There isn't much suspense to the kidnaping story. While it does have a bit of a twist ending, the film begins with Tae-ho in a police interrogation room, handcuffed, in his prison jammies, recounting the story. So, therefore, the ending is drained of any suspense about wether or not he'll get his comeuppance from his murderous buddies, and the story spends far too much time belaboring this point, showing his friends plotting his death, a doublecross we know isn't going to occur. It also seems to be padded with a lot of eccentricities for eccentricities sake. Maybe it was a Korean thing, but Tae-ho's dad seen whacking off while rubbing a hookers tit with a paint brush, just seemed like an obvious, out-there weird comedy gag and nothing else, yet we get two or three scenes showing his dad has weird masturbation habits. Likewise, Euglena is a eunuch because he got his balls bit off by a wild dog. Its just weird. While Takshi Miike can make that kind of odd detail work, Lee just spits it out there as a strange but utterly useless bit of backstroy. There are also many weird tangents that pad the running time, like the sideplot nun character with the bumpkin vocabulary and a bum with a gangrene leg that Tae-ho hangs out with.

The DVD: Tai Seng.

Picture: Anamorphic Widescreen. Positively terrible image quality. The print's contrast, sharpness and color quality are negligable becasue this thing is noisy as hell. The transfer has some bad compression issues leading to macro-blocking and general loss of fine tuned details. The transfers major failing point is especially prevalent in the numerous night scenes which are swimming with noise and posterization.

Sound: Original Korean 5.1 Surround, or Cantonese or Mandarin 2.0 Stereo language tracks. Optional Chinese or English subtitles. Nice audio track with a decent mix, not very responsive or extremely dynamic, but serviceable. The subtitles were okay. Some of the transitions seemed a bit fussy and over complicated.

Extras: Original trailer and tv spots. --- Music Video. --- Alternate Opening (16:40). I have seen the film before this review. I rented the Korean disc, on which, if my memory is right, this feature was labeled as a ‟press kit.‟ I think that may be a more correct label. It plays more like a montage of scenes rather than an alternate sequence. --- Behind the Scenes Footage (8:24). Just like it says, footage of a few scenes being shot, no talking head interviews, just a fly on the wall perspective.

Conclusion: Well, oddly enough, though I slag on the film, The Humanist was strange enough to keep me entertained- at first just to get a handle on the weird tone and by the end just to make note of how the flaws kept piling up. It is a real ‟love it or hate it‟ kind of movie, a real judgement call based on personal tastes. I couldn see how its odd tone and humor could swing viewers either way, I just happened to not like it. The disc transfer is a real turd. It is not low end or high end system friendly, so this edition is best left as a rental, at best.