Safety
first, kids. Remember, you never know
what some psychopath could sneak into your helmet, so you are better off not
wearing one, regardless how recklessly you might race through the city’s streets. One biker turned messenger learns this the
hard way in Jo Bum-gu’s Quick (trailer here), which releases
today on DVD and BluRay from Shout Factory.
In
2004, Han Ki-su broke up rather spectacularly with his girlfriend,
Choon-sim. It is a heck of a
pile-up. Seven years later, she has
reinvented herself as Ah-rom, the lead singer of an up-and-coming girl group,
while he has de-invented himself as motorbike deliveryman. Still fearless on a bike, Han delivers a bomb
for a mysterious client unaware of its contents. There will be more where that came from. Unfortunately, his ex Ah-rom will become a
part of the madness when she books Han to whisk her off to a gig. Putting on his helmet, she sees a rather
ominous countdown clock where there shouldn’t be one. As the voice on Han’s cell phone explains, he
has thirty minutes to make a series of deliveries of the helmet goes boom.
While
Quick owes an obvious debt of
inspiration to Speed, it could also
be considered the motorized forerunner to Premium
Rush, but with a more talented cast.
There will be plenty of breakneck weaving through traffic and unlikely
Evel Knievel jumps. There is also a
yakuza backstory to the mad bomber’s crime spree so convoluted, even the cops
can’t keep it straight. For stunt
driving though, Quick is hard to
beat. The hospitalized stuntmen seen
visited by cast members during the closing credits can attest to that.
Granted,
Kang Ye-won is considerably less annoying than Sandra Bullock, but her
character’s initial diva act is a bit cringy for a while. If nothing else, having a bomb attached to
your head ought to inspire clarity of thought.
Still, she looks good in vinyl as her character eventually settles in
and gets serious.
Frankly,
the humor in Quick is rather broad
and does not travel well. Fortunately,
Lee Min-ki never goes for laughs as Han, mostly brooding like a rebel without a
cause, except when he is raging against their tormentor. As biker movie protagonists go, he is pretty
good really. However, since the identity
of the evil mastermind is kept secret until well into the third act, Quick does not have a lot of
moustache-twisting villainy.
