Review: 200 Pounds Beauty (Kim Yong-hwa, 2006)

Kang Han-na is unhappy being fat, even though she’s a talented singer who ‘ghost’ sings for a successful popstar. At her lowest point she attempts to commit suicide before realising that she can have a operations to have the fat removed and become the beauty that she always wanted to be…

Review

Fat people – they’re so big and clumsy aren’t they? Isn’t that hilarious? According to 200 Pounds Beauty it is.

And people who have plastic surgery – aren’t they so fake and dishonest? According to 200 Pounds Beauty they are.

Or at least I think that’s what the film thinks. It’s kind of hard to tell from this confused comedy…

200 Pounds Beauty is a strange one. A lightweight, fluffy rom-com based on a Japanese manga, which has as much depth as the shallowest part of a very shallow thing – this ones strictly for the ‘leave the brain at home’ gang. The annoying thing is, if you can watch it by leaving the brain matter elsewehere  then its a charming little piece of fluff. Albeit shallow fluff that doesn’t make much sense.
Following in the footsteps of such ‘classic’ comedies as Eddie Murphy’s The Nutty Professor and Jack Black’s Shallow Hal, 200 Pounds Beauty opens with a lot of fat gags and a skinny person in an amusing, but not really convincing, fat suit. Kang Han-na  is a fat girl with friends, family, a dog and two very successful jobs, but she’s not happy because she’s fat. More specifically, the man she fancies doesn’t like her because she’s fat (a nice character you’ll agree and a real catch for some lucky girl) and so she tries to commit suicide. One failed attempt, some blackmailing and a stack of operations later, and Han-na  re-emerges as her new skinny, beautiful self. And she’s a fox, no doubt about it. Cue a few gags about how amazing looking she is and then the film lurches into the ‘rom’ without the ‘com’ as the laughs fall by the wayside and Han-na  manages to find ways to be liked by the same idiots who didn’t like her when she was a chubbster.
Now, maybe its because I’m not the biggest fan of romantic comedies, or maybe its because I missed some kind of logic within the film, but I can only come to the conclusion that 200 Pounds Beauty is a film about idiots. Almost everyone’s a shallow, fairly unlikeable character obsessed with success and appearances and are, of course, all skinny model types. Not that 200 Pounds Beauty really acknowledges this problem, in fact the ‘villain’ of the piece is only really singled out because she’s a bully. So far so confused. Some of the supporting cast are allowed to be ‘normal’ looking, but they’re the ‘ugly’ characters – the ‘ugly’ best friend (who, as I’ve just pointed isn’t actually ugly but is just ‘normal’ looking), the ‘loopy’ father and the rich, spoilt record company partner (a.k.a. comic relief) – characters who are ‘allowed’ to be average looking in a film like this, in fact the uglier the better because they’re there for comedy value and to ground the characters in the real world because there’s no point in being incredibly good looking (to quote Zoolander) if no-one is there to be jealous of you. This means that 200 Pounds Beauty tries to charm us through sheer will, and definitely not because we really like these people – when the film turns a corner and you find a previously fat girl trying to impress a shallow rich bloke (who preaches to her about how plastic surgery is wrong) you wonder where the hell its going. Not that we don’t know that it’s all going to end up ‘happily ever after’. Just don’t think too much about how it gets from A to B, stringing together a bunch of bizarre moments to give us a film that becomes so self involved in itself that it emerges out of its own backside at the end mumbling something about not being shallow.
If all of this isn’t bad enough, the real kick in the teeth is that 200 Pounds Beauty is very watchable and for the large part a really entertaining film. The cast is (I’m sick of saying it) pretty looking, but almost ironically all give character-less by-the-numbers performances, with the exception of Kim Ah-joong. She almost manages to pull the whole thing out of its hideous script and confused thinking with some great comedy timing, and she sings a few songs pretty well for good measure. She’s hilarious as ‘fat’ Han-na  and even funnier as the ‘skinny’ version straight after her operations. Sadly even she gets bogged down with the naff script in the second half of the film as she eventually succumbs to the blandness of it all and becomes just another pretty face along with the rest of the cast.

200 Pounds Beauty is a bit of a car crash film. Confused, convulted and even nonsensical, it’s hardly a social commentary on personal appearance, or maybe the shallowness of the record business, it’s just pure enjoyable nonsense. I guess the level of expectation for this type of rom-com should be set very low – so if you leave your brain out of it you’ll find it’s a mildly amusing couple of hours.