Indy Jones meets Leone - in Korea

Train robbers and bounty hunters, ricocheting bullets and bloody knife duels, desert ambushes and epic chases . . . the action never stops in Kim Jee Woon's The Good, the Bad, the Weird.

A giddy mashup of Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns and Lucas and Spielberg's Indiana Jones romps, this guns-a-blazing wide-screen Korean hit offers a nuttily staged, beautifully filmed, but kind of brainless homage to old-school Hollywood. (With new-school violence.)

Set in the 1930s in Japanese-occupied Manchuria, The Good, the Bad, the Weird stars Song Kang Ho as Tae Goo, an implacable thief who holds up a train, and comes away with a much sought-after treasure map. Those doing the sought-aftering include a sadistic, oil-slick-coiffed gang leader (Lee Byung Hun) and troops of the Japanese army. Following, and then allying with, Tae Goo is a Stetson-hatted bounty hunter (Jung Woo Sung) whose marksmanship and icy cool are both to be admired.

After an hour-plus of this deftly choreographed mayhem, punctuated with slapstick gags and jokey slaps at Chinese, Japanese, and Korean cultural stereotypes, The Good, the Bad, the Weird starts wearing you down. It's as though someone had decided to stretch a Road Runner cartoon to feature length, and by the 10th time Wile E. Coyote comes face-to-face with a bundle of dynamite, the adrenaline rush begins to feel more like a sugar headache.

But still, it's undeniably fun.EndText