Attack the Gas Station

 

As far as descriptive titles go, it’s a pretty apt one for this oddball South Korean comedy. Four bored, disillusioned youths attack and rob a gas station, trashing the place, terrorising the employees and making away with some cash. A few days later, they get bored again and rob the same gas station. This time the manager hides the money, so the four take the employees hostage and take over the gas station, pumping gas for customers and pocketing the money.

What follows is an strange night where they beat up a bunch of people, take a lot of hostages, force the hostages to fight each other, pump gas, antagonise customers, order Chinese take-out, antagonise the Chinese delivery man, antagonise the police and smash up the gas station a few more times. By the end a full-on street brawl has erupted between gangsters, angry take-out drivers and the police.

Underneath all of this are brief snippets of the main four that show reasons for their disillusionment. These segments give a little insight into the personalities of the main four, which helps because there isn’t much to most of the characters. The movie has fun with its premise, and is fairly entertaining for what it is, but it’s lacking that certain something to lift it up.

 

It’s not really about anything. Barring the central premise of ‘guys take over gas station, hijinks ensue’, there isn’t really anything of a plot structure. There is a gradual sense of progression as the night goes on, but otherwise it’s a series of fairly humorous events slightly linked until the morning where it ends. That ending itself is sort of shrug worthy, though the end credits give snippets of what happened to each character afterwards.

There is a sense of escalation and recurring events. The four of them continue to piss off a lot of different people, often with direct consequences of each other. They constantly antagonise a Chinese delivery man, causing him to form a posse of angry delivery men. Most events lead into each other directly, giving the escalation a sense of meaning. Otherwise the focus is mostly on the characters, which is odd because they are all pretty basic really.

The four attacking youths are the film’s heroes, and while it’s mostly a comedic light-hearted affair and played for laughs, some of the stuff they do is concerning and dangerous. They take two people hostage and lock them in a car boot, where they remain completely forgotten for the rest of the movie (to the point where it’s an honest question as to whether anybody will find them). They instigate two car accidents, beat a lot of people up and do some other pretty sketchy and dangerous stuff. While their anger and disillusionment is given some brief outlining, it’s a pretty thin reason for us to take their side as they terrorise the gas station.

 

No Mark, the leader, is odd. He spends a lot of the movie basically being a villain. He’s the most serious of the group, constantly threatening and assaulting the manager. He’s the most calm and collected of the group, but also responsible for the more illegal plans and ideas. His backstory might be a culturally specific one – he has the stigma of being an orphan. Honestly it’s sort of hard to really get behind him, he’s played straight so he comes across as a villain more than anything for the most part.

Mad Dog, the dumbest of the group, is fun. He carries around a wooden beam that he constantly makes use of. His job for most of the film is handling the ‘hostages’, which often involves making them lie down with their heads on the ground. He’s probably the most fun character, as his hijinks tend to be less malevolent and more juvenile, and underneath it he has a weird sense of justice.

Paint is the least involved and interesting of the four. He’s a painter/artist whose dreams and talents are trashed by his angry traditional father who considers his creativity pointless. He does some painting I guess, but he leaves the smallest impression of the group. There are side characters that get more attention than he does.

Rockstar is the most aggressive by far, often the first to violence. He spends a lot of the movie angry and annoyed at the lack of good music, forcing some of the hostages to sing for him, leading into a random music number (a lot of these Asian movies tend to do the ‘random music number’ thing). 

The gas station’s manager can’t help but antagonise the four, leading to further conflict. He constantly talks back, constantly riles them up and also constantly pays for it. It gets to the point where you wonder why he doesn’t just get with the program and keep his mouth shut, but I guess in a South Korean context it might make sense – he’s an adult and being talked down to and disrespected by a bunch of youths.

The rest of the characters are vaguely defined. Asides from the constantly-suffering gas station manager, there’s three employees, only one of which has any sort of defining features (he sort of develops a little bit of Stockholm syndrome and confidence when, forced to fight his school bullies, he actually wins). The majority of the ‘characters’ are the random people who turn up at the gas station, from lazy police officers to music producers and allsorts. None really have much of an impact.

Oddly not a single character emerges as the focal point. Not even any of the main four, with the film spreading its attention thinly amongst them. You learn very little about anybody, and nobody changes or grows as a person.  

 

This is going to sound really weird, and bear with me for this, but the movie feels a bit like a Korean teenage douchebag version of Clerks. While they are largely completely different films in almost every single aspect, they both have a similar sort of feel. It’s about disillusioned, aimless youths confused about the world, themselves and where to go with their lives, largely avoiding these questions through shenanigans. It’s also just a bunch of random, humorous things happening in place of a plot. Much like Clerks, it’s also about the everyday oddness of working in a mundane environment and the sorts of people who patronise those places. Weird, angry people tend to turn up at the gas station, while the four tend to harass them and take their money.

It’s also has some culturally specific themes, regarding South Korea culture, where cultural differences come into play. What I assume to be a Korean phonetic word game is played by two of the characters with zero explanation, while certain quirks seem Korea-specific. The filmmaking is fine, with occasional stylistic edits. The movie almost completely takes place in and around the gas station, rarely venturing outside of its confines.  

 

Attack the Gas Station pretty much does what it says on the tin. A gas station gets attacked, there’s some humour and a little action thrown in. It’s fairly entertaining but it also never really ascends to anything particularly special.