This
Joseon era conman is not simply offering his mark a reasonably priced bridge.
He will sell him the whole river. Of course, he will act like he doesn’t want
to sell, because like they say in The
Flim-Flam Man: “you can’t cheat an honest man.” The treasonous governor of
Pyongyang is as dishonest as they come. Yes, he is from the North and he has allied
himself with Qing China. He is asking for it and Kim Seon-dal is just the man
to take it all from him in Park Dae-min’s Seondal:
The Man Who Sells the River (trailer here), which opens this Friday in Los Angeles.
When
Kim first met his accomplices Bo-won (no surname he claims, with pride) and
Gyeon, they were slaves sold to the Chinese army by Governor Sung Dae-ryeon.
Faking their deaths on the battlefield, the trio returned to Korea, where Kim
and Bo-won launch a string of highly embarrassing confidence schemes. They even
make off with a generous helping of King Hyojong’s gold—as in the King of all
Joseon. They do their best to keep the naïve Gyeon at arm’s length from danger,
but their efforts backfire when they try to heist a large shipment of Sung’s
tobacco.
Kim
and Bo-won will target Sung again with their next scheme, but this time it will
be personal. However, they can find plenty of allies in the subsistence farmers
he dispossessed to make room for more tobacco fields. About the only thing that
interests Sung more than tobacco would be gold. Oddly enough, a mysterious
young scholar and his manservant seem to think the River Daedong is loaded with
the stuff and he claims to hold the title.
If
Richard Lester had directed The Sting in
between his Three Musketeers movies, the vibe would probably be similar to Seondal. They are plenty of twists and
small cons abetting larger cons. There is also a spot of swashbuckling and a
passion for justice, administered Robin Hood-style. Ko Chang-seok’s Bo-won is
definitely in the comic relief business, but he never overindulges in shtick.
He is much more in the bickering odd couple tradition than the rubber-faced
slapstick that marred the otherwise entertaining The Pirates.
Arguably,
the twentysomething Yoo Seung-ho does not look seasoned enough for a picaresque
rogue like Kim, but he still develops some appealing buddy chemistry with Ko.
On the other side of ledger, Cho Jae-hyun has Darth Vader-like presence as the
thoroughly evil Sung. The audience wants to see him fall—hard.
