AllMovie

Aimless Bullet is a shockingly grim look at postwar Korea. Filmmaker Yu Hyun-Mok, clearly influenced by Italian neo-realism, uses squalid Seoul locations along with the blunt brutality and overt symbolism of Lee Jong-Ki's screenplay to transcend what was obviously a limited budget and issue forth a searing crie de coeur. This is a stunningly accomplished work and a notable landmark in Korean cinema. While the plot, with the endless succession of misfortunes that befall poor Song Chul-Ho (Kim Jin-Kyu) and his family, borders on melodrama, the naturalistic presentation makes it believable. From the ailing mother who arises from her bed only sporadically, and only to emphatically exhort her family, "Let's get out of here!" to the crippled captain who can no longer face his former love because he prefers to dwell on the dreams they once had, to Chul-Ho's untreated toothache, Yu is clearly dealing in the symbolic in presenting a vibrantly bitter cross-section of the destroyed Seoul working class. He wisely (and realistically) avoids descending into total darkness, offering a few poignant moments of hope and genuine affection between his characters, but the ugly desperation of the times is never far from view. While the film's stark black-and-white palette renders the opening nighttime exteriors a bit too dark, the filmmaker's cogent visual style frequently emerges through the murk, as in the sharp sequence in which the disgraced Chul-Ho walks his sister home from the police station, walking further and further apart on the busy street until finally they exit the screen in opposite directions. Chul-Ho's willingness to bear constant pain and follow the rules may be admirable, but in the end, in the degraded society of postwar Seoul, his virtue is as meaningless as Yong-ho's (Choi Mu-Ryong) futile act of rebellion.