Critics reviews

Park makes a noble attempt to suffuse the meditative soulfulness of Takeshi Kitano’s “Fireworks” into the propulsive genre tropes established by more recent (and more Korean) forebearers like “A Bittersweet Life,” but he just can’t find the same poetry in that silent pain as he’s able to produce from the screaming kind.

While the visual and thematic richness of "Night in Paradise" could adequately carry the film on their own, the wry comedic tone that often infiltrates even the darkest exchanges between characters enhances the overall emotional payoff.

For the most part, this dousing of paradise in blood and bullets is masterful, but there are times when the film’s aim wanders... If you’re able to overlook the occasional see-saw between extraneous gore and sentimentality, though, "Night In Paradise" is up there with the most compelling Korean gangster movies in recent years.

Leisurely pacing rather draws it all out a bit, but there’s real inventiveness to the way Park wrong-foots the viewer and handles the operatic displays of gunfire and death – and the leads are rather charming.

It’s an achievement, crafting an in-depth crime epic that at no point glamorizes any aspect of the nefarious lifestyle; there’s a cumulative power to the film’s laser focus on the inevitable shitty turns awaiting us all. But it’s exhausting, too.

Going flat out with bloody violence and idiosyncratic characterisation... "Night in Paradise" falls down in pacing, feeling overstretched and slow to cut to the carnage. Addicts of Asian gangster action will relish, but the odd mix of hardcore viscerality and ruminative borderline-sentiment could limit the film’s appeal.

The new movie has its moments, but also has dull stretches that many viewers are likely to fast-forward through to get to the next shooting and knifing scene... Night in Paradise contains a lot of good plotting, several amusing characters and a decent array of exciting action scenes and bloodshed. But it is indulgently long, even within scenes, like the needlessly protracted opening explosion that sets the story in motion.