![]() Amidst his not so gentle attempts to get rid of the carpenter whose store messes up with his plans to build a shopping mall, he accidentally meets a nerdy voracious teenage boy with thick black-rimmed glasses in a ramen shop, and falls on him, verbally, like a ton of bricks. Careful about his looks, Jang Pan-su (between teaching folks lessons in a hard way) eats a healthy diet, is good at martial arts and has slightly compulsive-obsessive reactions to other people's untucked shirts. It is clear that all of them, be it good or bad use the proved recipes with the same basic ingredients, because what else can you do in a body swap movie, then swapping people in each other's bodies? The opposites always qualify for the plot, and fine seasoning is needed to make it work, which proves to be the case in Kang Hyo-jin's comedy “ The Dude in Me” (aka “The Man Inside Me”), his fifth long feature “The Dude in Me” is available from Echelon Studiosīuilt on a classical nerd and cool dude switch formula, the film initially centres around the middle-aged, successful ‘businessman” Jang Pan-su ( Park Sung-woong), married to a pretty, but bored to death and not very much on the faithful side daughter of a mafia boss. That said, not everyone has Carl Rainer's ability to make a screwball comedy like “All of Me” (1984), blessed with hilarious dialogues and unforgettable performances by Steve Martin and Lily Tomlin, nor the creepy vision of a body swap penned by Mike Werb and Michael Colleary for John Woo's “Face Off”, with John Travolta in his scariest role so far. Unless they aspire to bring some big message across (bad idea), they are designed to make the audience either laugh or shudder. And just like Face/Off, it’s bonkers, but in the best way.The greatest thing about the body-swap movies is that nobody expects anything else from them than being entertaining. It manages to veer into generation-gap territory as dubious as that of Big whilst maintaining that classic Freaky Friday teen charm. The Dude in Me draws on the timeless cinematic trope of the body swap and fills it with fun twists and farcical scrapes. After all, if you remember not to take the film seriously, the corny, emotional string soundtrack and melodramatic exchanges are even more comically rewarding. It’s best not to study the ethical guidelines too closely: if you can accept that a ruthless gangster can get complete redemption, you’ll be free to enjoy the mayhem. The movie does attempt to draw out a moral message, but only after an unrelenting onslaught of comedic violence. When it comes to plot and pacing, the feature could get to the point a lot faster if it lost about half an hour of its runtime – but then, trying to identify a wider purpose to the film beyond entertainment may be a fruitless exercise. The physical comedy lands spectacularly, with Jung perfectly pulling off the contradictions of a hardened, combat-trained 40-year-old man in the body of a prepubescent adolescent. This is a picture that truly puts the slap in slapstick. The physical jabs, though, are another matter. Admittedly, the screenplay is about as subtle as a punch in the face and the constant fat jokes for the first half of the film do wear a little thin, but the feature is so ridiculous that none of these infantile body-shaming jabs hit hard enough to offend. This bizarre premise is a goldmine for quickfire comedy. As high school corridors collide with the high circles of the South Korean mob, all hell breaks loose. But when Pan-soo happens across old acquaintances in his new body, he begins to question his past choices. ![]() When nervous and nerdy schoolkid Kim Dong-hyun (Jung Jin-young) falls from a building and knocks mob boss Jang Pan-soo (Park Sung-woong) into a coma, the latter finds himself thrown into the life of the former, forcing him to fight off bullies whilst still keeping his own criminal life on track. Luckily, it’s funny enough to get away with it. As a classic body-swap comedy, it’s a film fuelled by the collision of two unlikely worlds, but unlike beloved blockbusters such as Face/Off and Freaky Friday, the feature also merges two equally unlikely genres – teen flick and gangster movie – creating one marvellously melodramatic mess. ![]() If you need a break from commentative, philosophical cinema and you’re looking for weird and wacky fantasy that defies all logic and completely loses the plot, there’s no better film than The Dude in Me.
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