Heungnyong Wang gwa Bihodongja

(Interestingly enough, this is my first review of a series after all these years. I guess this movie did something to move me.)

Thunder Prince is one of those movies that you end up watching on a whim. Either this amounts in a hidden gem that you try ever so hard to tell your friends about, or you end up wishing it ends back up in the obscurity it crawled out from. Unfortunately, Thunder Prince, or "Heungnyong Wang gwa Bihodongja," ended up being the latter.

Coming out of the gate, the story is supposed to be a tried and true story about how a boy brings ... justice by coming up against the man who killed his father. The premise is not trying to reinvent the wheel or anything, and that's alright. However, the pacing and delivery of this story is hilariously terrible. We end up spending more than half the movie on the main character's childhood in the forest (where each minute felt like an hour), yet when we get to the final parts, the pacing is nearly breakneck as we speed towards the end, even forgetting a plotline in favor of haphazardly crossing the finish line. The movie is only 68 minutes, but it is absolutely apparent that whoever was in charge had no idea how to pace a story.

In all honesty, though, when one watches a martial arts show or movie, what the viewer is really looking for is the martial arts choreography. On this end, the martial arts is halfway decent to barely passable most of the time. The movie struggles with making fights between two people look natural. Oftentimes, characters will hit each other, but the animation never makes it feel like there was any bodily contact (despite what the generic punching sound effects try to desperately tell you). The choreography of the training montages are marginally better, though not awe-inducing or anything.

In general, the aesthetic and animation in general range from barely passible to hilariously bad. Color palettes switch between shots, and characters frequently go off-model. Some animation looks recycled. The designs are nothing to write home about, opting for generic designs across the board. The fight scenes do look noticeably better (I assume whatever was left of the $20 or the peanut butter sandwich that was used to work on this went more towards those scenes as they should).

Now, the only convenient legal way to watch this film in the US (as far as I understand), was by way of the English dub online. I do understand that the music was probably done by the localizers. The dub is a hilarious trainwreck and probably the best-worst thing about the movie. All the performances were phoned in, and all the voices sounded as if they were recorded in a closet or bathroom. The music was not mixed properly either, so sometimes the dubbed lines couldn't be heard over the music. While I do not have access to the original Korean audio track, I don't expect the track to turn the film from a 3 to a 10.

Thunder Prince wasn't a great movie. I generally like deep-diving older movies and shows to see the aesthetics of the past, and sometimes you find films that really should have stayed there. I think there were a couple of so-bad-it's-good moments to relish in, though not quite enough for me to heartily recommend it in that capacity. This movie deserves a 3. It doesn't have anything ethically objectionable; it's just boring and forgettable. If you come upon this movie by chance, just like I did, just go skip it and watch something else. You're not missing a thing.