Wesley Fenlon | Not with a bang but a whimper.

Yoon Tae-goo races cheerily across the rocky hills of an endless Manchurian desert, his dead World War II-era motorcyle fading to his back. Further behind him lie the Japanese army, a gang of treasure hungry misfits, a vicious assassin, and an unrelenting bounty hunter. Tae-goo patters on, never stopping, never slowing, cackling with glee — and just like Tae-goo, the movie he stars in is an exhilerating high-energy adventure, stuffed with dazzling setpieces and thrilling cinematography that rivals any Western western from the past 20 years.

The Good The Bad The Weird wears its spaghetti western influence on its sleeve, drawing both name and plot points from Sergio Leone’s landmark conclusion to the Man With No Name trilogy. Writer/director Ji-woon Kim is clearly a student of Leone’s work, but he tempers his appreciation of the classic style with a remarkably original Eastern western. The Good The Bad The Weird is almost constantly upbeat, delicately balancing its gun battles between graphic violence and lighthearted action-comedy.

This is mostly thanks to Yoon Tae-goo (The Weird), a petty thief whose remarkable luck and survival skills take center stage throughout the film. His antics range from entertaining to knee-slapping hilarious, and as he continues to escape one outrageous situation after another, his own stature in the film’s world is slowly revealed. By film’s end, the character we once assumed to be a clumsy fool turns out to be…well, the best clumsy fool in all of Manchuria.

The Weird crashes a train heist planned by The Bad, who sports a giggle-inducing emo haircut and enough stereotypical asian bad guy mannerisms to make him the perfect villain. He looks out of place, which is partially the point; he’s too cool for all that cowboy shit, but he’ll still walk the walk and slice you up good with a knife or two. Tae-goo makes off from the train robbery with a treasure map in hand but soon crosses paths with Park Do-won (The Good), a valiant bounty hunter out to collect on both The Bad and The Weird. Even The Good, who hunts down nefarious bounties to satisfy his own sense of justice, can’t completely resist the treasure’s allure.

The Good may skirt closest to his analogue in The Good, the Bad, and The Ugly. Actor Woo-sung Jung plays the quiet badass, the lone gunman. He’s not Clint Eastwood…but he’s not trying to be, either. Rather than try to capture the grit and unmatchable screen presence of a grizzled, cigar-biting Eastwood, he plays The Good with an understated charm. He just assumes he’s awesome, and merely has to wait for us to catch on.

The Good dazzles, The Bad Sneers, and The Weird keeps us riveted, but all three are shown up by the you-gotta-see-it-to-believe-it dynamic camera work. The zoom — a somewhat taboo technique in cinema — is put to brilliant use here. The camera sometimes tracks around and zooms in and out in one single long take, switching focus from an individual character to a bustling set. When you pair some of the best western action scenes ever imagined with audacious cinematography, the result is a film brimming with explosive excitement.

The Good The Bad The Weird definitely has its own Eastern flavor, set in a Japan-occupied Manchuria that encompasses the typical arid deserts of westerns and the decidedly untypical Chinese villages and bazaars. But Sergio Leone’s spaghetti westerns marched to a different beat than American cinema, while still retaining that western essence. Very few westerns since 1968 have lived up to Once Upon a Time in the West, and over the years spaghetti westerns have become almost synonymous with the best the genre has to offer. If another film like The Good The Bad The Weird comes out of Korean cinema, noodle westerns may well be the future. And if you’ve seen this movie, that’s a future you’ll be as excited for as I am.