Critic Reviews

The funniest film you'll see this year about a political assassination.

Though The President's Last Bang is undeniably dense-with more than a dozen significant characters-the particulars aren't too tough to understand.

This meticulously well-made picture is disarmingly funny at times - not least during the ballet of bloody absurdity that is the assassination itself - but also subdued and straight-faced, with one eye planted on 1979 and the other on the violent student demonstrations looming in the distance.

An outrageous, savagely comical account of the disastrous circumstances surrounding the assassination of dictatorial South Korean President Park Chung Hee in 1979.

This South Korean political satire might not have historical resonance for American audiences -- it's loosely based on the 1979 assassination of dictator Park Chunghee by his own people -- but it takes the same comically dim view of governmental power and procedure as "Dr. Strangelove."

Take the real-life 1979 assassination of Park Chung-hee, the despotic, hedonistic, seal-testicle-loving president of South Korea, and stage it as if the Marx Brothers were running the country, and you might get The President's Last Bang.

Almost satirical.

Writer-director Im Sang Soo's coolly stylized political satire doesn't provide a lot of answers, unfortunately, but it does show how the future of a nation might turn on a few drunken insults thrown around at a high-level dinner party.

South Korean cinema finally gets its first full-blown political satire with The President's Last Bang, a virtuoso slice of sustained black humor.

Tight, sober and strangely comical.