[Mild spoilers ahead.]
I find myself ambivalent about 6ixtynin9, or A Funny Story About 6 and 9 as the film is also known. This film was made by a celebrated Thai director, Pen-Ek Tatanaruang, who also made Last Life in the Universe.
It's as though this movie is trying to be two, or even three, kinds of film at once but not really melding things into a proper alloy. The DVD box bills it as a comic thriller, but I found it dangerously indecisive. Sometimes it's a comedy, and a funny one; sometimes it's a gangster film, and a fair one; sometimes it's a horror movie, and not a particularly distinguished one. You can feel that this movie was supposed to be darkly comic, but it just doesn't gel. If I had to pin it down, I'd call it a gangster thriller, with comedy shoehorned in.
The movie is the story of Tum (pronounced like "doom"), who as the movie opens is laid off from her job. She faces money problems now and she's suicidal. The next morning, she finds a noodle box full of cash ($25,000!) at her front door. It's the answer to a prayer until the gangsters who left it there by mistake — the number 9 on her door keeps slipping down to look like a 6, hence the movie's title — want it back. They muscle into her apartment and try to rough her up. Tum displays the usual movie pluck, and kills them both.
After that, it's a long train of mistaken identities, incompetent thugs, crossed purposes and a growing pile of bodies in her tiny apartment as two rival gangs, the police, friends and her nosy neighbors get involved. Through it all, Tum keeps dealing with it, coping and trying to get ahead. The situation builds and builds until one death too many pushes her to the edge and then a massive Mexican standoff makes her ultimate decision for her.
Remember: if you are in the middle of a multi-party Mexican standoff, make sure the phone is turned off.
Had this been played as a dark thriller with horror overtones, it would have been a movie like Audition or The Eye, films with cool surfaces and calm characters riding a rising tide of fear and horror until the climactic violence interrupts. Had the violence and death been downplayed and the comic side frenzied up, this would have been a caper comedy like any number of films Hollywood churns out. But the film's languid pacing and deliberately unfurled, refolding narrative keep the comedy from building a momentum necessary to comic success. The opposite applies: the comic interludes keep the movie from sustaining the horrific mood a thriller needs.
Article comments
1 - Chris Beaumont
Interesting review, it sounds like something I may like.