{"id":8408,"date":"2007-09-10T20:21:58","date_gmt":"2007-09-11T00:21:58","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/?p=8408"},"modified":"2007-09-10T20:21:58","modified_gmt":"2007-09-11T00:21:58","slug":"jopog-manura-my-wife-is-a-gangster-2001","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/10\/jopog-manura-my-wife-is-a-gangster-2001\/","title":{"rendered":"Jopog Manura, (My Wife is a Gangster) (2001)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"My_Wife_is_a_Gangster_movie_poster\"<\/a>Jin-Gyu Cho\u2018s film is a very unusual little entry. It\u2019s basically all over the map in terms of the genres, and is really never what you expect it to be. The premise reads like a sitcom, except with violence and mystery a la \u201cLa Femme Nikita.\u201d Sure, in some places that could lead to an awfully messy film, but \u201cMy Wife is a Gangster\u201d surprisingly works. Eun Jin is a mob boss named Big Brother, who was given the tag of a legend after taking on a group of men to defend a friend in combat. But after so many years of acting like a man and grimacing, she finds her long lost little sister and now must stick by her while she dies. Her sister wants one thing for her: she wants her to get married.<\/p>\n

\u201cMy Wife is a Gangster\u201d attempts to appeal to basically all crowds, and in many ways it succeeds. For the men, we\u2019re given some fantastic action sequences as Eun Jin is forced to confront rising tensions between her men and the White Sharks, all the while forcing herself to reconsider her stance on life once her sister requests a change. Jin doesn\u2019t adjust well, and it makes for some of the funniest sequences in the film. For the women, we\u2019re basically given an unusual romance and some scenes that veer dangerously close to Gary Marshall territory. Eun Jin must now act like a woman and do away with the usual idiosyncrasies that make her so tough, especially when she comes across a new man she tags to be her husband. \u201cMy Wife is a Gangster\u201d is funny and pulls off some rather hilarious gags like Jin being proposed to with her men standing in the dark, and her practicing on seducing her new husband.<\/p>\n

Park Sang Myeon is sublime as the husband who is basically used as a subject for everything Eun Jin doles out, and stands by her regardless of her abuse and cold nature. Eun-Kyung Shin is absolutely memorable as this warped tomboy forced to behave as a female, and inhabit a soft nature once she\u2019s forced to marry this man she has no affection for. She\u2019s abusive and constantly cold and yet Shin\u2019s performance keeps Jin a consistently sympathetic character we can\u2019t help but root for. As the familial elements are introduced gradually, we\u2019re given scenarios that are funny, but are also very telling of her personality including her first encounter with a child, and her honeymoon. Shin has soft and plain features which allow us to basically find her attractive without ever doing away with the dignity of the character, while also signifying this character\u2019s clear lack of identity in her own world. She\u2019s neither male nor female, neither cold nor warm, neither sexy nor frumpy. Cho\u2019s film doesn\u2019t have a particular focus, thus the film can\u2019t easily be pigeonholed.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s no more action than it is romance comedy, and vice versa, and that\u2019s what I enjoyed about it. Cho combines all these sub-genres into one unusual hybrid, and it\u2019s no better summed up than the wedding sequence where Jin is at the alter marrying while her men battle rival gangsters in the balcony. Thankfully though, Cho prevents the usual romance comedy clich\u00e9s by constantly breaking the mood with grim violence and great fight scenes, and thankfully prevents this from becoming a foreign Gary Marshall film. \u201cMy Wife is a Gangster\u201d is more about the transformation of a woman who was once a cold killer turned a softer family woman, while Cho consistently entertains us.\u00a0 This is far from what I expected it to be, but thankfully that\u2019s not a caveat. \u201cMy Wife is a Gangster\u201d easily could have been an irritating mess, but Cho balances many genres to create an unusual, hilarious, and memorable movie for the men and women folk.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jin-Gyu Cho\u2018s film is a very unusual little entry. It\u2019s basically all over the map in terms of the genres, and is really never what you expect it to be. The premise reads like a sitcom, except with violence and mystery a la \u201cLa Femme Nikita.\u201d Sure, in some places that could lead to an […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[12],"tags":[58,113,219,240,391,617,631,874,1087],"class_list":["post-8408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-movie-reviews","tag-action","tag-asian","tag-comedy","tag-crime","tag-gangster","tag-m","tag-martial-arts","tag-romance","tag-thriller"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=8408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/8408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=8408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=8408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.cinema-crazed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=8408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}