Fridae

You may have seen the sexy poster: Korean heart-throbs Song Seung Heon and Kwon Sang Woo are both bare-chested and laughing, with their arms curled platonically around each other. The homo-erotic poster is obviously targeted at the gay male and straight female crowd. But as it turns out, this violent gangster film is really tailored for the straight male audience only.

Song and Kwon play two of four friends who rob a casino together. But Kwon plays his friends out, causing Song to end up in prison. Two years later when Song is released, he finds that Kwon has turned into a complete thug terrorizing the people close to Song. Song vows to put things right...

Directed by Kim Hae-Gon, Fate is a standard Korean action flick that tries to incorporate themes of friendship and loyalty into a gangster/war picture. While that formula may have worked like a charm in the film that started it all � Friend (2001) � and continued to work in subsequent films like Brotherhood (2004), the formula feels rather shopworn in Fate.

Part of the problem may be director Kim's preference for staging fast action sequences over the more painstaking process of character-building. We enjoy the slick action scenes, but we never quite get to know the characters.