I’ve watched quite a few Korean films over the years, and since cinema is an international language working with most of the same dramatic tropes, genres, conventions and plots, I’ve never had much trouble categorizing what I was watching or keeping up with the plot.

Kim Bong-han’s “The Wild,” a gangster film of old allegiances, old grudges, guilt and double crosses, tests that universal “coherence” belief.

It’s a violent revenge thriller with a whiff of “atonement” for one’s sins woven in. Easy enough to understand. But it’s absurdly chatty (in Korean with subtitles) and thin on explanation for who the various characters are and their relationship to each other, or at at the very least, slow to deliver that information.

A character or characters go by different names, always a problem for viewers dropping in from another culture on your Korean crime drama. Then there’s the many MANY spellings of character names and actor names on various websites (IMDb), which differ from how they appear on the subtitles.

Just watching it, from its prison release opening to the flashbacks to the crime that put our anti-hero behind bars, to various schemes and alliances set in motion to the bloody finale, would challenge any non-Korean, and perhaps a few folks from or on the Peninsula, too. But try taking notes so that you can keep it and “them” straight, as a critic must do.

The fights are furious, there’s a heartbreaking rape scene, and something just short of a wholly satisfactory finale delivers its message of redemption. But man, tying it all together is never more than an afterthought.

Park Sung-woong of “Hunt”stars as Woo-cheol, an ex-boxer we meet on the day he gets out of prison. His old running mates are there to greet him, backslap him for doing the time, ply him with drinks and make plans, plans which he smiles and seems to dismiss.

Woo-cheol once worked with gangsters, and had a hand in helping his childhood friend Jang Do Shik (Oh Dae-hwan) get rich through fixed fights. Do Shik is now “President Jang,” running gambling, prostitution and drug smuggling operations with the help of Kang (Jung Soo-Kyo) and the fishing boat smuggling gang led by Gak-su (Oh Dal-su).

President Jang accomplishes all this because he has inside help. But the Det. Cho (“Jo” on IMDb), played by Joo Suk-tae (“The Hard Day,” “The Great Battle”) is a drug addict and a sadist who loves beating prostitutes half-to-death. He’s a “problem” that Jang must contend with.

And when Woo-cheol rescues sex-worker Bom (Seo Ji-Hye), whom he’s met as a getting-out-of-prison “present” from Jang, and beats the hell out of the stoned detective, that “problem” gets even more complicated.

With lots of moving parts, many figures pursuing their own agendas and mutual mistrust all around, there’s little chance that smiling, quiet, remorseful Woo-cheol will get his wish of just living “a quiet life,” maybe signing on to a ship for a long work-voyage.

It would have been helpful to know this druggy-brute, shooting-up and torturing hookers, was a cop before well into the movie’s middle acts. Relationships are seriously under-explained early on, leaving me a bit unmoored as Woo-cheol is coered back in for muscle and negotiating help with the untrusting smuggler gang.

We can understand why the filmmaker would hide the fact that hooker-Bom isn’t who she seems.

But the betrayals and back-stabbing seems to come out of nowhere, the shifting allegiances hard to follow and the cluster of characters tossed into the opening scenes only truly understood by late in the second or early in the third act, make everything that’s going on in the interim something of a muddle.

Writer-director Kim stages some epic beat-downs and brawls, with knives and cleavers the weapon of choice among many. A lot of characters test the ex-boxer, and learn the error of their ways.

Through it all, leading man Park maintains a quiet stoicism that holds it all together. More or less. But that turns out to be a pretty tall order for a simple-enough-genre thriller whose director is hellbent on sowing confusion and creating narrative chaos for a huge portion of his picture.

Rating: unrated, rape, bloody violence, drug abuse, nudity, profanity

Cast: Park Sung-woong, Joo Suk-tae, Seo Ji-Hye, Jung Soo-Kyo, Oh Dal-su and Oh Dae-hwan

Credits: Scripted and directed by Kim Bong-han. A Well Go USA/Hi-Yah! release.

Running time: 1:50