[yasr_overall_rating]
After a heroic death, a firefighter navigates the afterlife with the help of three guides.
Kim Ja-hong (Cha Tae-hyun) is a firefighter who is killed during an insanely high-risk rescue. While the girl rescued survives thanks to Ja-hong’s bravery, Ja-hong is not so lucky. Events seem to be rushing around him and he seems ever encapsulated, isolated from such events until he then realizes he didn’t make it. Bringing this detail front and center are two of his three guardians, the flashy yet somewhat bored Haewonmaek (Ju Ji-hun) and the bubbly Dukchoon (Kim Hyang-gi). The third guardian, Kangrim (Ha Jung-woo), the leader and most serious of the trio is absent but meets the others and Kim Ja-hong later. It’s clear from the beginning that Kangrim is playing his own game, making his own rules while breaking longstanding ones and this is partly because he is ready to move on to his own life (as are the others), and Kim Ja-hong just may be the ticket to the express lane.
Kim Ja-hong is a paragon, an exemplar. Someone who went beyond the pale living a moral life and acting upon one’s moral duties. And he’s the golden ticket for his guardians who have been waiting lifetimes to be reincarnated. If Kim Ja-hong can prove that he is worthy of his paragon status, and can pass the tests of each of the seven hells within 49 days, he will be reincarnated quickly, and that gives his guardians the chance to also be reincarnated. But they must act as his defenders, during these trials. Quite literally as his afterlife attorneys, they must thwart each accusation that is thrown at him during each trial in each part of hell. It is during these trials we learn what kind of person Kim Ja-hong truly is. And it’s far more complicated than a daring firefighter with a heart of gold. Not even a paragon is without sin.
“Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds” is an overly long and sometimes complicated action flick, but it’s worth the effort of muddling through. To put it plainly, it’s a bit of fun (in a Dante’s Inferno kind of way). And although it can get a bit syrupy, and pulls a couple of tear-jerking cheap shots, there’s plenty of tough moral-meat to chew on, and perhaps choke on. What “Along with the Gods: The Two Worlds” comes down to is family, loyalty, and forgiveness. And the only way to save our paragon is time, a vengeful spirit, a rule-bending Grim Reaper, and a mother’s love. There’s a 50/50 chance you’ll at least feel a wet warmth inching at the brim of your eyes, even amongst the plethora of CGI and green screen heavy shots.
The film may be a half hour or more too long, with too much going on. There was no real need to cover so much background (a lot of it repeating) on some of the characters, and if there was a need for it to truly be 2 hours and 20 minutes, it could have at the very least presented the situation between Kim Ja-hong’s brother Kim Soo-hong/the Vengeful Spirit (Kim Dong-wook) and the strange situation he was in with his military brothers a bit more clearly. For a film so long, there are pockets story that seem rushed, creating muddied ties to the meat of the plot. That aside, it dazzles as any fantasy flick about the travails of Hell could, and ends on a promising note.
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