I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK

The director's stamp is all over I'm a Cyborg, But That's OK. It's filled with the trademark beautiful visuals, bold uses of colour and CG flourishes fans of Park Chan-wook will appreciate. Also familiar from his Vengeance Trilogy are the imaginative fantasy sequences, and a similar score that gives off the impression of a director putting on a pair of comfortable slippers.

The film though is a disappointing misfire. While it picks up in the second half where something resembling a plot kicks in, far too much time is spent on frankly boring episodes, with a script that seems content to observe the goings-on inside the mental hospital where the film takes place without commenting on them or concern for narrative impetus. After nearly an hour or so of this it's tempting to switch off, and I wish I could say the pay-off was worth persevering for, but it falls just short.

There are a handful of wonderful individual moments in the picture, particularly in the second half: the amateur surgery to implant a device into our heroine's back, a tense cafeteria sequence where the patients are as nervous about the outcome of a meal as the audience, a couple of magical but all-too-brief musical numbers, doctors mown down in a hail of bullets. They're incorporated seamlessly into the movie, but they have a tendency to stick out like sore thumbs considering everything surrounding them is so dull.

Ultimately it's quite a touching film with some funny moments - and it looks gorgeous - but it doesn't seem to serve much of a purpose and fails more often than not in its attempts to be quirky.