REVIEWS OF WINDSTRUCK

WINDSTRUCK aims for an airy blend of quirky and sweet.

But it gets grounded in a no man's land between awkward and sentimental.

At first glance, the talents behind this latest Korean import look promising. Director Kwak Jae Yong and star Jeon Ji Hyun were the winning combination behind the breakout hit My Sassy Girl (2001).

Jeon's character, the impulsively gungho tomboy police officer Yeo Kyung Jin, bears more than a passing resemblance to the bullying girlfriend of My Sassy Girl.

In fact, the first time Yeo meets the boy of her dreams - self-effacing physics teacher Go Myung Woo (Jang Hyuk) - she actually tackles him to the ground and arrests him. She has mistaken the do-good Go for a snatch thief.

As in My Sassy Girl, the progress of this oddball romance is charted by the various ways in which Yeo ill-treats the befuddled Go. The career-minded Yeo plunges into dangerous situations with ambitious alacrity, dragging a reluctant Go with her.

Once again, Jeon portrays a winning blend of brassy and bashful. While she switches modes with deceptive ease, the same, unfortunately, cannot be said of the storytelling.

The movie, which opens with Jeon leaping off a skyscraper in an apparent suicide attempt, lurches unevenly from romantic comedy to action thriller to sentimental weepie.

In the last third, the reason for the title suddenly becomes evident when tragedy strikes. And the story becomes unbearably soppy as the director seeks to wring every last bit of schmaltz from the doomed love story.

Director Kwak, also responsible for the saccharine The Classic, has a film fan's adoration of the simple power of cinematic cliches.

My Sassy Girl was a clever spin on the romantic comedy which gained an unexpected bite by adding girl power to the traditional image of the subservient quiet Asian girl.

The Classic was a mostly-successful attempt at reclaiming the cliches of romantic melodrama.

But in Windstruck, Kwak seems to have bitten off more genres than he can chew. Making Yeo a cop offers Kwak the chance to shoot a riproaring gun battle and a cool car chase in action movie style.

A romantic interlude where Yeo tells Go a story turns into a live action fairytale embellished with plenty of impressive CGI in a fantasy mode.

And the tragic end for the lovers pulls out all the stops in an attempt to out-hankie every weepie Hollywood has ever dreamed up.

But all the gimmicks fail to cohere the way they did in My Sassy Girl. One reason is the overload of genres.

Another is the relative weakness of the chemistry between Jeon and Jang. Jang is outmatched by the subtle charisma of Jeon.

As the setpieces pile up unrelentingly, only Jeon succeeds in holding her own amid the genre wreckage, while Jang looks increasingly lost before disappearing entirely from the movie.

The lighthearted comedy of the first half does not establish the emotional connection sufficiently strongly to support the drama of the second.

As a result, Windstruck is blown over as easily as a house of cards under the weight of its ambitions

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PRETTY CRITICAL OF THE FILM BUT I STILL SAY ITS WORTH THE $8.50...SO WATCH IT K