He Was Cool - Korean Film Recap/Recommendation

This article is a partial recap and recommendation. Some minor spoilers of our leads meeting is described and pictured below.

The 2004 Korean film He Was Cool, is like teleporting back in time to visuals with much vintage appeal from set décor, which was trendy in early 2000s, to the styling of the cast. This is an in-your-face romp, with some highly entertaining characters. This includes the underlining of school thugs, first love run-in of your average, sassy, schoolgirl getting mixed up with the most thuglife school bad boy who becomes fascinated and intrigued by her. 

Viewer warning: There is some light profanity in this film.

It’s a neat reflection on the earlier times of the internet. Before the back and forth of when people used their actual names online, before reverting to mysterious online user aliases and then once again back to real names i.e. Facebook.

In this particular case, all-girls school student Han Ye Won (played by Jeong Da Bin) is irritated when she checks out her school’s webpage to discover that someone has trolled it with a nasty message.

Ye Won responds with a sassy reply of her own and then thinks nothing of it until she gets a mysterious phone call. She blows it off until she discovers the caller is Ji Eun Seong (played by Song Seung Hun), a notoriously known vocational school bully with a majorly bad rep!

Ye Won doesn’t expect to encounter him, but he keeps harassing her with phone call threats. As chance would have it they both happen to be in a hair salon at the same time. He decides to call her again, threatening to kick her- ahem, bottom again. She’s fed up by his constant calls, that while she’s in the midst of having her hair set and he’s getting his hair dyed, she literally screams into the phone her reply. Catching him, along with his friends who were waiting, as well as herself  by surprise when they all realize the awkward moment of truth.

And it goes forth with boy chasing girl. But not in the romantic way, he’s totally ticked off with her in the moment and is out for some payback revenge against this girl who challenged him.  However, she manages to evade him.

Now having set eyes on each other Ye Won is worried as a next encounter is easily predictable.

Later, she tries to bypass his posse, who are laying in wait at the front school gate, by sneakily jumping over a school wall.
Lo and behold, he just happens to be on the other side.  As she leaps in mid-air with thanks to some cheesy, vintage, special effects, crash lands onto him and the two kiss - accidently of course!

He wastes no time in telling her to ‘take responsibility’ and that she better call him.

Eun Seong and his close 3 friends reminded me just a pinch of what the F4 would be like if they were low-class school thugs. Unlike the famously wealthy, flowerboys that are seen in Boys Over Flowers,his group of friends are popular, but more infamous for their fighting prowess. Granted the story line of the two stories are completely unrelated and not even remotely similiar.

These guys are a hilarious group of punks!

Meanwhile, Ye Won doesn’t really intend to call Eun Seong. To make matters more compliated, her cell phone is cut off, and so she tries to make a call from a payphone. However, at that moment, a creepy ajusshi approaches her and forcibly tries to take her to his car, thinking that she is a prostitute. 

Eun Seong’s gang, who is coincidently nearby, happens to notice this but doesn’t realize it’s her at first. A comedic, well-timed brick to the windshield and she is rescued.

Our bad boy lead then walks her home and the rest, well just takes off from there!

Further in as relationships shape up there is more character developments and depth that are best left out from here, I hope this short recap might spark your interest to check out this film.

He Was Cool is rough around the edges in tone of writing and characters types. That is the very thing that makes it a fun story to follow, especially when the dialogue between characters isn’t always as polished and articulate as we are used to seeing in those charming, sugar-coated rom/com dramas. If you haven't seen it yet, I hope you enjoy it! And for those of you who have already seen it, I hope it brings back fun memories of the film for you.