The Foul King (2000) poster
2000 · comedy · drama · sports

The Foul King

Directed by Kim Jee-woon1h 52m2000
ElsewhereIMDb6.92kTMDB6.994
  • warm
  • brisk
Movie DNA

Warm, kinetic, measured comedy / drama, grounded in texture. Ambivalent, intimate, measured, hand-scored across twelve axes of taste.

How every film is hand-scored →

Dae-ho is a timid, unproductive, constantly harassed bank clerk. He starts secretly wrestling and adopts the persona of the cheating villain wrestler "The Foul King". He starts to stand up for himself but things soon start to get out of hand.

Our read · The Foul King (2000) reads as a warm, kinetic, grounded comedy · drama · sports entry — measured in intensity, intimate in scope, measured in temperature, ambivalent in outlook. Hand-scored on twelve axes of taste — mood, pacing, weirdness, hope, stakes, humour, reality, density, warmth, auteur, intensity, and era — with a derived palette drawn from its dominant cinematography.

Where the cast leads
Fingerprint

The shape of The Foul King

Tonight, this looks like

What watching it is actually like.

You want a Korean underdog comedy where a meek clerk reinvents himself as a cheating pro wrestler.

ends upliftingyou’ll be fine aftersteady all the waygrips by minute 22attention 3/5earns its lengthsubtitles: full
Date nightWith friendsSoloWith parentsKids around
Heads-upgraphic violence

Skip it tonightSkip if wrestling satire or physical roughhousing comedy doesn't appeal.

DNA · twelve axes

The reading.

Each axis is hand-scored — not derived from votes or genre averages. The marker shows where this film sits; the gradient fill uses the film's own cinematography palette.

Mood · HeavyCosy
Pacing · Slow-burnKinetic
Intensity · GentleExtreme
Weirdness · ConventionalSurreal
Hope · NihilisticRedemptive
Stakes · IntimateEpic
Humour · NoneBroad
Reality · GroundedFantastical
Density · SparseTwisty
Warmth · ColdTender
Auteur · TransparentSignature
Your take
Rate it
star-clip-1-0star-clip-2-0star-clip-3-0star-clip-4-0star-clip-5-0
React
Discussion

Discussion

cmd enter to post

What does your Movie DNA look like?

Rate a few films you've seen. We map your taste across the same twelve axes and find the films you'll actually want to watch tonight.

Calibrate yourself