The history of this camp is actually true... I just wish somebody made a better movie about it.

By the end, fancifully snappy dance numbers vie with grisly bullet ballet for top setpiece honors: Kang stages both with aplomb, leaving audiences caught between crying and cheering.

"Swing Kids" is such a dizzying, anachronistic mash-up of genres and cultures -- tap-dancing musical, violent war movie, social-justice drama, and slapstick comedy -- that it deserves respect, even if it falls short as it strains to cover all these bases.

The film does for the Korean War what Life Is Beautiful did for the Holocaust - it injects verve and fun into very grim subject matter.