Starring Yoo Oh-seong and Kim Woo-bin. In Korean with English subtitles. Rating not available.

If there’s something to be learned from the gangster epic Friend 2: The Legacy, it’s that the criminal underworld is nowhere as horrifically brutal as it seems on the news. Countless acts of violence are committed in this handsomely shot sequel to Friend, which smashed box-office records in South Korea in 2001. Because no one in the country’s port city of Busan seems to own a gun, the gang warfare consists primarily of stabbings, fistfights, and baseball-bat beatings, with the occasional chain-saw amputation thrown in for colour. What jumps out is that, for all the carnage, there’s a bizarre lack of bloodshed. In the rare instances where someone gets their hands dirty, it’s not in a way that will make anyone forget Scarface.

The film has the original gangster Lee Joon-seok (a steely-eyed and effectively underemotive Yoo Oh-seong) finishing a 17-year jail sentence for murdering a rival crime lord who also happened to be his best friend. Serving as his protégé as he struggles to regain his footing in gangland is Choi Seong-hoon (pinup-perfect Kim Woo-bin), who has a connection to his new boss that’s more complicated than it seems.

The timeline-jumping script is often a challenge to follow even if you’ve seen the first installment. But the bigger problem is a movie preaching violence as a solution to all of a gangster’s problems yet never going for the jugular.

Writer-director Kwak Kyung-taek—who helmed the original—somewhat atones for this with a story that offers some fascinating insights into the world of organized crime in Korea, with honour, custom, loyalty, and respect being recurring themes. The film also has sequences that are outright operatic in their execution (see the slow-mo revenge scene on a hospital floor set to Luc Baiwir’s gorgeously orchestral “Genesis”). For five minutes, it’s hard to argue with the artistry of Friend 2, even if it’s still a geyser of blood or two away from something great.