The President's Last Bang (2005, South Korean)

Based on the events of the final day in the life of former South Korean president Park Chung Hee, The President’s Last Bang is a weird, sometimes comical, portrait of what happens when coups, military and otherwise, go horribly wrong.

By most accounts, Park, who utilized seemingly every opportunity in order to remain in office between the military coup that brought him to power in 1960 and the assassination that ended his life in 1979, was a power-hungry bastard, and Last Bang certainly makes this image stick. Park’s last day is spent drinking, humiliating his underlings, and groping the young women delivered to his private compound. However, those characters seeking Park’s overthrow don’t look much better in comparison – Kim Jae-kyu, head of the South Korean CIA and friend turned foe to the president, is shown to be debilitated by a liver disease that has robbed his body of the ability to even perform a bowel movement - but what remains uncertain is whether his body is poisoning his mind, or vice versa.

Structurally, Last Bang moves in fits and starts, and without a primer on South Korean political history of the 20th century, the identities and motivations of some of the central characters are utterly mystifying. Still, the film is quite concise on the subject of power and its ability to corrupt absolutely, and it spares no character in its portrayal of a particularly ugly political hornet’s nest.