Jean-Paul’s Rating: 3/5 stars

Bottom Line: Starts as a brilliant movie about a con. Ends as…uh, something else not nearly as fulfilling.

“Parasite” has been getting a lot of buzz recently and I can see why. The first half of the film is brilliant. It follows the down on their luck Kim family as they methodically insinuate themselves into the life of the rich and gullible Park family. The pacing of this part of the movie is pitch perfect. The dialogue is witty and delivered with perfect timing even with subtitles. I had a smile on my face throughout. And then…things happen.

This is one of those movies that delivers a record scratch right in the middle and the quickly becomes about something completely different. Sometimes this works wonderfully like in “From Dusk Till Dawn”. Shut up. It was a good movie. In “Parasite” it just feels a bit too jarring. It had me for a while and I was interested in seeing where it was going with everything, but then it takes a sharp right turn and fails to deliver on the promise of the movie up to that point. The biggest issue for me was that the motivations of the people up to that point and what they did after did not at all mesh. There was certainly room to establish what happened, leaving hints here and there, but the movie failed to do that.

There are all sorts of things to say about class and it’s hard not to think, with a title like “Parasite” and the content of the movie, that the movie is partly anti-poor as an answer to the plethora of anti-rich films that have been released lately. It’s also possible that the movie is a joke about how rich people view poorer people. What’s especially funny is the Kim family, despite being completely unqualified on paper for the jobs they take, are actually very good at them and find themselves in a great position, but they keep reaching for more and more until it lands them in big trouble. They have the “big score” mentality which must be as pervasive in South Korea as it is in the United States. All of it can be seen from so many different viewpoints, none of which are necessary to the movie, but which provides all sorts of wonderful subtext for discussions with friends.

“Parasite” is still a movie worth seeing even if I didn’t think it lived up to the hype that it is getting. The first half is really quite fun as long as you don’t mind movies with subtitles. The director, Bong Joon Ho, appears to direct movies about class quite a bit, with his previous movies “Okja” and “Snowpiercer” being very class conscious as well. He’s definitely a director to keep your eye on in the coming years and I’m sure “Parasite” will open doors for him like never before.