Quick | 퀵 [ Movie Review ] ★★★1/2

The Pitch

Quick 퀵 caught my attention with it's box office performance in Korea. It didn't managed to top the box office during it's run in Korea cinemas. Each week, it was outflanked by other Korean movies like The Front Line and Sector 7. But at the year end tally of total admissions, Quick was ahead of The Front Line and Sector 7. That piped my curiosity. What the draw of this movie which look strikingly like Keanu Reeves' Speed?

The Plot

Legendary biker Han (Lee Min-Ki) used to roam the streets recklessly with their motorcycles. Now he works as a courier boy who delivers his customer's goods in record breaking time.

His past caught up with him when his colleague dispatch him to send Ah-Rom (Kang Hye-Won) a member of a successful pop idol group to a concert. It turned out that Ah-Rom used to be his girlfriend and he broke her heart by cheating on her. Just as Han was about to proceed with the delivery, a mysterious caller warns him that Ah-Rom is wearing a helmet with explosive. If Han doesn't makes the deliveries within the time limited that the mysterious caller set, the helmet will explode. If they try to remove the helmet or are separated more than 10 meters, the helmet will explode.

The deliveries that they have to make are obviously explosive in nature. Not only that, they have to deal with Ah-Rom insistence on making a detour for her pop idol group's performance, the persistent hounding by Ah-Rom admirer cum Han's ex arch rival cum traffic police officer Kim Myung-Sik (Kim In-Kwon) and a conspiracy theory involving Japanese Yakuza. The chain of events and characters provide the set up for a series of unexpected fun and thrills.

The Perspective - Quick Movie Review

Quick 퀵 - think of it as "Speed" infuse with nonsensical humor and what a ride it was. In fact, there's even a climatic ending on board on a speeding train that stood out as a form of "homage" to "Speed". It might not have been equally thrilling but Quick stood out on with it's side bursting gags that kept me laughing as the explosive thriller unfolds.



Scenes like Ah Rom performing pop songs and bathing with her helmet made me laugh out loud. The mystery behind the assassination via explosive kept me on the edge of the seats. The unlikely team up between ex lovers had just the right amount of chemistry to make me look forward to resolution of their relationship.

One of the reasons why Quick worked as a comedic thriller has to do with the two protagonists. Lee Min-Ki and Kang Hye-Won are pretty good looking and they have screen charisma to carry the movie through. They are also quite proficient with comedy and even in an outrageously nonsensical movie like this, there's enough charisma from them to make one want to root for their tumultuous relationship to work out.

There's a couple of things that diminished the joy of watching this movie. The special effects used to aid the dangerous speeding scenes were unevenly made . While some was passable, some special effects stood out like a sore thumb. However it's not a deal breaker here as pace of the story moves quickly and something interesting would come along and keep the mind preoccupied.

And then there's the outrageous choices made in this movie that were a bit hard to swallow even in a nonsensical movie. Scenes like Ah Rom's insistence to perform with her pop group when a time bomb is literally ticking on her head really applied the damper on the pace and logic of the movie. But then again, it went on to product one of the most funny and exhilarating scene of the movie and these problematic issues were easily forgotten.

Quick is a comedic madcap adventure of explosive proportion. It has a well blend of tense moments and laugh out loud moments. There are some minor problems with the movie that could be easily overlooked. Quick comes Highly Recommended.


Rating: ***1/2

Coda
During the credits roll at the end of the movie, there are the NG segments that showed how difficult it was in making this movie. Even though there were many action scenes that were aided by special computer effects, some of the crashes were real and the stunt team had to endured painful falls and injuries to bring us the laughs. Kudos to the movie makers for making the effort to highlight the stunt team's hard work behind the screen.