Lump Sugar (Give-Away Version) DVD Region 3

Starring Lim Su-Jeong, who gave a star-making creepy performance in The Tale of Two Sisters, Lump of Sugar starts off with Sieun, a little girl whose race jockey mother had just died, risking certain death to see her mother's snowy grave. Luckily, her mother's racehorse General shows up at the nick of time to save her. Over the years, Sieun and General would come to share a close bond until one stormy night, General dies in a fairly graphic horsebirth scene. Promising General that she would take care of her son Thunder, Sieun begins to play the role of the surrogate parent, and all is right with the world. However, her strict father, who didn't want to raise Thunder in the first place, finds out that Sieun has taken the jockey exam. Not wanting Sieun to meet her mother's fate, her father sells Thunder away, and Sieun leaves home devastated to become a jockey anyway.

Cue two years later, Sieun realizes the reality of professional horseracing - the negligence of corrupted horse trainers, the indifference of rich greedy horse owners, and the ruthless ambition of young jockeys. Meanwhile, on the other side of town, Thunder is somehow captured by a sleazy nightclub promoter and is forced to work for him. One day, Sieun is fired from her racing team after being unjustly accused of causing a horse's death. On the way home, she sees Thunder in the streets and quickly reclaims him for her own. Helped by a down-on-his-luck-with-alcoholism-but-has-a-heart-of-gold-trainer-with-a-hidden-past Yoon (Friend's Yoo Oh-Seung), a kind investor, and her family, Sieun takes Thunder into the circuit and begins to rise up the ranks. However, this is a Korean melodrama, so the reality of the horseracing world would naturally begin to take its toll on the pair.

Lump of Sugar is essentially Seabiscuit (the real-life Hollywood biopic) in modern South Korea with a cuter protagonist. Nevertheless, director/screenwriter Lee Hwan-Kyung does capture what makes the formula successful and milk it for all that its worth. Lee crafts an emotional roller coaster, taking the audience through one tragedy after another while sprinkling doses of hope when the film needs it. Though Lump of Sugar is slightly uneven in the first act by rushing through a series of events, it finds its footing in the second act, creating a lovable character in Sieun and crafting a relationship between Thunder and Sieun believable enough that the audience can still barely cling along the multiple melodramatic twists in the story.

That is ultimately the downfall for Lee's screenplay: it packs so much melodrama at the end of the second act that the trials and tribulation of Sieun/Thunder, including the events that lead up to the ultimate tragedy in the third act, begins to grow absurd in the way that only Korean melodramas can. Nevertheless, Lee surrounds himself with excellent actors. Lim Su-Jeong proves her versatility as a leading actress with her affecting performance as Sieun, charming humans and horses everywhere. However, Lee places so much focus on his protagonists that a focused story comes at the cost of the supporting characters he also crafts; at best, Yoo Oh-Seung makes a convincing caricature of a has-been, but the kind owner who befriends Yoon is so underdeveloped that he spends half his scenes talking about the need to train strong Korean horses (the influence of the Korea Racing Association coming into play here) and asking Yoon how to find a good horse. Worst of all, villains that audiences have been waiting for the whole film to receive their comeuppance simply disappear in the end, proving Lump of Sugar to be sometimes a frustrating experience.

The third act aside, Lump of Sugar is mostly a satisfying melodrama with ace technical work. The horse races are captured with an undeniable energy, with the sound team pumping up the bass to maximize the impact and the scenic location work is as close to Hollywood standards as any other national cinema. I didn't even bother to poke at several major plotholes (how exactly did Thunder return to Korea, and how did Sieun get Thunder back from his cruel exploitive captor?) because I wanted to root for Thunder and Sieun (both equally lovable, mind you). But its melodramatic trappings led the film astray, moving needlessly deeper and deeper into tragic territory until someone just has to die. As a result, Lump of Sugar remains a bittersweet commercial melodrama that could have been a contender, but falls off two-thirds of the way and can only limp to the finish line. Still, it's really not hard to see why the film had such staying power at the Korean box office: the characters are involving, the storytelling is fluid, and the impressive Hollywood-standard technical work all help Lump of Sugar become the audience-pleaser it almost became.

by Kevin Ma