Review - FRIEND: THE GREAT LEGACY Shares Little with Original

By Pierce Conran

12 years is a long time in the film world but for Korean cinema it seems like almost an eternity. In 2001 I had yet to seen an Asian film, let alone was I aware of Korean films. Yet when I did dip my toes in two years later, Friend (2001) was among the first Korean films that I saw. With its nostalgic air and easily relatable theme of friendship, delivered through a conflation of coming of age, high school and gangster tropes, it wasn’t hard to see why it became the most successful Korean film of all time. Though its record has since been broken many times over, the film’s reputation lives on.

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