[HanCinema's Film Review] "Daisy"

Every single character in this movie is a naive idiot who is incapable of learning from past experiences. As "Daisy" opens there's some hope that maybe this is actually the point. Portrait artist Hye-Young (played by Jun Ji-hyun) openly notes her lack of romantic experience in the initial voiceover. Romance in the mind of hitman Park-Yi (played by Jung Woo-sung) is kind of sweet and yet, well, also kind of incredibly creepy. It's hard to imagine these two having any kind of future when their initial expectations start out this bizarre.

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Then we meet Interpol agent Jeong-Woo (played by Lee Sung-jae) and he has the same ridiculous ideas, even though this older presumably more normal man should have grown up out of this nonsense a long time ago. When he comments in a voiceover that his actions are putting Hye-Young in danger and that he should know better, my immediate reaction was not, oh, that's just how love works. It was "well of course you should you moron you're putting yourself in danger too!"

Yes, in case the characters' professions didn't clue you in, this is a film that involves gunfights. Sloppy, largely incompetent gunfights that are just rather laughable in general execution. I have no idea why an Asian league of assassins does all of its business in the Netherlands. The United Nations maybe? Too bad we never see anyone that could reasonably be called a diplomat. I'd expect that assassins and Interpol would prefer to avoid having wide-open gunfights in a country where such events are almost completely unheard of, but then this is not a movie that puts much thought behind tactics, military or otherwise.

The guiding naivete behind the main characters' romantic reasoning after a point just gets so frustrating that it's painful to watch. The dialogue is astonishingly corny, and seems to be built entirely on the understanding that certain love story situtations are inherently romantic regardless of context. The dorky delivery that the actors put on all their lines only makes these matters worse.

Now, again, if this were deliberate, "Daisy" might be a somewhat passable film. But it's not. The movie clearly expects the audience to empathize with the ridiculous beliefs of the characters, who are choosing to make everything complicated for no good reason. There's never any convincing pretensions that Park-Yi particularly cares about being a good assassin, or that Jeong-Woo cares about being a competent police officer, so they're waxing on about being conflicted between duty and love feels really hollow, especially since they always unamiguously choose the latter. Frankly, this kind of scriptwriting is just plain insulting to the viewer.

I like a decent romance as much as anyone. But I shudder at the idea that anyone would watch "Daisy" and think there's anything sweet or lovely about what goes on here. Every bad thing that happens to every character in this movie is their own fault for choosing to be an idiot romantic when they could just as easily be a halfway self-aware romantic instead. A single intelligent conversation could clear up all the conflict in a single scene, and a compelling reason is never given for why it never happens. This is a film about weakly-written lovelorn idealists in a fairy tale world with guns. "Daisy" is every bit as dumb as it sounds and absolutely not worth watching.

Review by William Schwartz

"Daisy" is directed by Andrew Lau and features Jun Ji-hyun, Jung Woo-sung and Lee Sung-jae.

 

Available on DVD from YESASIA