Review: ANGRY PAINTER Presents Artsy Revenge Erotica

By Pierce Conran

Following his trip From Seoul to Varanasi in 2011, arthouse filmmaker Jeon Kyu-hwan took a bigger leap overseas with Angry Painter, an indie tale of revenge and despondency that spends much of its running time trapping through the cold climes of Estonian capital Tallinn.

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Review: TRAIN TO BUSAN Rides the Rails With the Undead

By Pierce Conran

For his live-action debut Train to Busan, indie animation director Yeon Sang-ho, whose films The King of Pigs and The Fake have drawn international acclaim, has taken the zombie thriller, stuck it into the claustrophobic confines of a train, and taken aim at Korea's government and its hierarchical divides. A tense and inventive mix of genre thrills and social anxiety, Train to Busan is a Korean blockbuster with an unusually clear focus.

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Review: THE TIGER, A Gory, Gorgeous Battle To The Death

By Pierce Conran

Following the record-breaking success of Roaring Currents, Choi Min-sik returns to screens in another big-budget period epic, this time hunting down the last Korean tiger (as opposed to the last tiger in Korea, because this feline clearly has a national identity) in Park Hoon-jung's end-of-year release The Tiger.

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Review: THE OUTLAWS, Familiar but Punchy Thriller Shows Us New Side of Seoul

By Pierce Conran

Buff and lovable star Ma Dong-seok takes on his best leading role to date in the gritty crime tale The Outlaws, which adds laughs and punch to a modest story framed around Chinese-Korean hoods and local law in a low-rent Seoul neighborhood. First time director Kang Yoon-sung keeps things simple and on-track but knows when to juice up the tempo to avoid any slack in this surprisingly effective Chuseok holiday offering.

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Review: Straightforward Action in NO TEARS FOR THE DEAD

By Hieu Chau

Writer-director Lee Jeong-beom made a big splash in 2010 when his confidently made action feature The Man from Nowhere became a box office hit in South Korea. It made a believable action star out of its lead, Won Bin, and had an emotional core that helped it lean closer towards other, well-established action films of its ilk such as Luc Besson’s Leon: The Professional (1994) or Tony Scott’s Man on Fire (2004). Lee follows a similar format with his newest ultraviolent follow up, No Tears for the Dead, which at times feels like it could have been another Tony Scott film.

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Review: THE SUSPECT Eschews Drama for Action, and Lots of It

By Pierce Conran

Thinking back to Shiri (1999) and Secret Reunion (2010), North Korean spies have a history of success at the Korean box office. Local producers have been especially keen to capitalize on their appeal this year with no less than four big budget spy thrillers infiltrating screens. Of the three released to date, two of them (The Berlin File and Secretly Greatly) were big hits (around seven million admissions a piece) while last month's Commitment failed to generate much buzz (barely one million viewers). On Christmas Eve, The Suspect will bring its high-octane cocktail of action and intrigue to theaters, bringing the count to four.

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Review: THE HUNTRESSES Misfire in Poorly-Plotted Blunder

By Pierce Conran

Following the recent hits Masquerade (2012) and last year’s The Face Reader, period films are set to make a big push into the Korean market in 2014 with at least six big Joseon era films poised to flood the market. Getting the ball rolling in the new year is the action comedy The Huntresses, a film initially set to debut last spring but rescheduled by distributor Showbox when the project needed more time to complete digital work in post-production. Entering a crowded Lunar New Year field alongside Miss Granny, Man in Love and Hot Young Bloods, the film is hoping to draw in family crowds with its fun premise and trio of female stars.

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Review - The Spy: Undercover Operation Should Have Stayed Under Wraps

Korean cinema has gotten very good at staging impressive onscreen spectacle in recent years. Though $10 million budgets used to be a rare thing, reserved for only the most ambitious and promising films, these days an abundance of these pricey projects are flooding the market. As with everywhere else in the cinema landscape, studios feel a need to continually up the ante as they worry about the diminishing attention spans of their audiences. But for every film that spends its money wisely many more appear that could easily be labeled a waste: of the production budget, as well as the audience's time. Which brings us to The Spy: Undercover Operation.

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PiFan 2013: The Terror Live Can't Quite Go the Distance

In an era of oversaturation at the cineplex, with countless retreads and follow-ups dominating the marquees, sometimes a gimmick is just the trick to freshen things up. A clever and well-executed hook can seem fresh and original, but if poorly done, it can easily torpedo a film. In the case of new Korean action-thriller The Terror Live, a chamber piece that takes place entirely in a radio recording studio, the gimmick in the premise is both its saving grave and its downfall.

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UDINE 2013: The Thieves (도둑들, 2012)

Part of MKC's coverage of the 15th Udine Far East Film Festival.

The most anticipated Korean film of the year, with its dazzling cast and international locations, opened late last month and has since become the biggest domestic box office behemoth in years. The Thieves, Choi Dong-hoon’s fourth feature, following The Big Swindle (2004), Tazza: The High Rollers (2006), and Woochi: The Taoist Wizard (2009), is his most ambitious yet. It is a vibrant and complex heist movie with one of the most high profile casts ever assembled for a local production.

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KOFFIA 2012: Metamorpheses (변신이야기, 2011) and the Impact of Film Schools on Korean Cinema

Part of MKC's coverage of the 3rd Korean Film Festival in Australia (previously published).

One of the aspects of Korean cinema which strikes people the most once they become acquainted with it, is the highly sophisticated level of the production values.  From a technical standpoint, Korean films are often on par or even above their Hollywood counterparts:  cinematography, sound, production design, editing, and even special effects are deftly handled with skill and care.  Wondering how this is the case for a national industry that had been until relatively recently a marginal one is a worthwhile question.  The answer therein lies in examining how a cultural and economic climate fostered this type of change.

During the intense state-driven globalization of a newly democratized Korea in the 1990s, which was known as seghewha, the cultural sector was heavily promoted.  With the creation of a few different motion picture laws that, among other things, provided tax breaks for investment in the film industry, the chaebol, which were large corporations such as Daewoo and Samsung, got involved in film production.  Just as you would modernize any other industry, the film industry’s production standards had to be quickly brought up to speed due in large part to the chaebol’s injection of significant amounts of capital.  However, it wasn’t just money that led to today’s technical proficiency.  I would argue that perhaps more than anything, it was the education of a skilled below-the-line workforce that contributed to the phenomenon.

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KOFFIA 2012: War of the Arrows (최종병기 활, Choi-jong-byeong-gi Hwal) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the 3rd Korean Film Festival in Australia (previously published).

It’s about time I threw my hat into the ring and chimed in on War of the Arrows, the top-grossing Korean film of 2011, which has met with positive reactions from all over the globe.  Early in 2011, if you were familiar with the big films that were scheduled to come out throughout the year, you could be forgiven for expecting Sector 7 and The Front Line to dominate the charts during the summer months.  In the end the former was a cataclysmic failure, likely because it was a terrible film, and the latter fell below expectations, it was a decent film but perhaps a little thin to play well given its subject matter.  One film you may not have noticed, I know I didn’t, was War of the Arrows, a straightforward period action film with mid-level stars and no pretense about it.

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The Thieves (도둑들, Dodookdeul) 2012

The most anticipated Korean film of the year, with its dazzling cast and international locations, opened late last month and has since become the biggest domestic box office behemoth in years. The Thieves, Choi Dong-hoon’s fourth feature, following The Big Swindle (2004), Tazza: The High Rollers (2006), and Woochi: The Taoist Wizard (2009), is his most ambitious yet. It is a vibrant and complex heist movie with one of the most high profile casts ever assembled for a local production.

Popeye and his crew leave Korea to get in on some action in Macao. He brings Pepsi, who has just been paroled, along for the ride. The mastermind behind the big scheme is Macao Park, Popeye’s former partner and Pepsi’s old lover. The plan is to steal the Tear of the Sun, a valuable diamond in transit in one of the city’s casinos. With Popeye’s crew, a Hong Kong team, Park and a few more vested interests, can the plan go off without a hitch?

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NYAFF 2012: War of the Arrows (최종병기 활, Choi-jong-byeong-gi Hwal) 2011

Part of MKC's coverage of the 11th New York Asian Film Festival.

It’s about time I threw my hat into the ring and chimed in on War of the Arrows, the top-grossing Korean film of 2011, which has met with positive reactions from all over the globe.  Early in 2011, if you were familiar with the big films that were scheduled to come out throughout the year, you could be forgiven for expecting Sector 7 and The Front Line to dominate the charts during the summer months.  In the end the former was a cataclysmic failure, likely because it was a terrible film, and the latter fell below expectations, it was a decent film but perhaps a little thin to play well given its subject matter.  One film you may not have noticed, I know I didn’t, was War of the Arrows, a straightforward period action film with mid-level stars and no pretense about it.

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The Yellow Sea (황해, Hwang-hae) 2010

Since the days of the New Korean Wave of the late 80s and early 90s men in Korean cinema have frequently found themselves on the road in search of answers, a home and their identity.  In contemporary Korean cinema male characters are for the most part much more comfortably settled within the progressive society of modern Korea and yet their philosophical dilemmas still simmer under the surface, refusing to go away.

Four years ago, Na Hong-jin burst onto the scene with one of the most remarkable debuts in modern times.  The Chaser was an under-the-radar genre effort from a rookie director with two mid-level stars, and yet it became one of the highest grossing films of the year and along with The Good, the Bad and the Weird was also one of Korea’s most popular exports.  Today, in the spring of 2012, Na and his two stars Kim Yun-seok and Ha Jung-woo are among the heavyweights of the Korean film industry.  Kim’s last five films have all attracted well over 2 million admissions; in fact most of them have soared over the 5 million mark (The Chaser; Woochi, 2009; Punch, 2011), a enormous benchmark in the Korean industry that few films have reached.  The charismatic Ha is now one of the country’s top leading men, indeed two of his films topped the box office last month alone (Nameless Gangster, Love Fiction).

For Na’s sophomore feature, the gang got back together again and delivered another worldwide hit in The Yellow Sea, originally released in Korea in December 2010 and presented internationally at the Cannes Film Festival in May 2011.  Just like his first film, Na’s follow up is firmly rooted in genre but disassembles and reconstructs it to further his own ends.  Beginning as an ominous rumble in the distance, the film accelerates to the point that it becomes a heart-pumping descent into despair. 

Ha Jung-woo plays Goo-nam, a down on his luck cab driver in the Yanbian Korean autonomous prefecture of Northeast China who loses at mahjong every night as he hopelessly tries to earn enough money to pay off the loan sharks who funded his wife’s passage to Korea.  He’s offered a job to clear his debt by Jeong-hak (Kim Yun-seok), which sees him smuggled into Seoul in order to kill a man.  He has a week to carry out the contract and while on the peninsula will try to track down his wife whom he hasn’t heard from since she left.

Na’s mise-en-scene is downbeat, gritty and very evocative.  We follow Goo-nam around Yanji, a dirty city full of forgotten souls.  It operates like a lawless border town, steeped in vice and hopelessness.  The film is split into a few chapters which each up the stakes over the last.  Goo-nam’s debasement is the key narrative point for much of the film and more than anything, what defines this is his fractured identity.

Throughout most of The Yellow Sea he find himself in transit or on the run.  He is preyed upon and taken advantage of from the outset; his lack of clear national identity is also the source of his lack of confidence.  There is an early scene which features stray dogs and it quickly becomes clear that this is what he is.  He only fights back through the basest instincts of survival.  Much of the action takes place in boats, buses, cars, ports and roads and Goo-nam is always in danger.  Like the emasculated males that found themselves wandering the roads of earlier Korean cinema, he seeks his identity through lines of transportation but in modern Korea, a country that often seeks to forget about its past, he is not welcome.  He is a visible and painful reminder of an oppressive and traumatic recent history.  Whether jumping off a boat, apprehended on a bus, chased on the street or crashed into while driving a car, he is forced into the wild, away from civilization.  Conversely it is only in these scenes, high up in the mountains, that the threat dissipates.  Despite the looming danger, he is safe in the untouched and austere calm of the outdoors.

The Yellow Sea begins as a gritty drama and thriller, and then turns into a suspense film for its second chapter but then becomes an unapologetic and propulsive action film for the significant remainder of the running time which, though 140 minutes long, is breathless.  It’s an exhausting and sometimes morbid experience to be sure, but the pure energy and raw vitality of the set pieces are exceptionally effective.  Much of the pulsating back half of the film had me short of breath.

Just like in The Chaser, Ha and Kim are exceptional.  Though their roles as protagonist and antagonist are reversed, they are remarkably engaging.  Ha truly embodies Goo-nam’s despair while Kim, despite his dead eyes and listless mumble is one of the most ferocious and animalistic cinema villains of recent times.

I will say that The Yellow Sea is best enjoyed as a genre effort as held under close dramatic scrutiny, it may turn up some unsatisfying conclusions.  A small price to pay in my eyes for what was one of the most invigorating cinematic experiences of the last few years.  While Korean cinema may have a lot more to offer than its thrillers, when a film like this comes along, it’s easy to see what all the fuss is about.

The Yellow Sea is out on DVD/Blu-ray in the UK on March 26th, from Eureka Entertainment.

★★★★☆

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

To keep up with the best in Korean film you can sign up to our RSS Feed, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Quick (퀵, Kwik) 2011

Bikes

Having more or less caught up with all of the this past summer’s major Korean releases, the first thing that comes to mind is that if I ever see a motorbike in a Korean film again, it will be far, far too soon.  The two main culprits in my eyes are Sector 7 and Quick, and the thing that they share in common is Yoon Je-kyoon, the producer who was also the director behind such hits as My Boss, My Hero (2001), Sex Is Zero (2002), Miracle on 1st Street (2007), and Haeundae (2009). Not too long ago I decided to savage Sector 7 in my review as I felt it was a disaster that needed to be called out for the contempt it showed its audience, thinking moviegoers would be content with novel 3D effects at the expense of a solid story and engaging characters.  Thankfully spectators rejected the film as it suffered one of the most calamitous post-opening weekend drops in Korean film history.

Quick is not as bad a film but it does demonstrate a similar lack of respect towards its viewers.  What I mean to say is that it’s an overburdened everything-but-the-kitchen-sink comedy-actioneer that is designed to appeal to everyone but could never hope to satisfy anyone.  There is very little that the filmmakers didn’t throw in to the mix in a bid to attract viewers.  There’s k-pop, gangsters, biker gangs, youth violence, washboard abs, scantily clad women, inefficient police, romance, and of course melodrama, all that in addition to the heavy doses of action and comedy.

Flying bikes

Gi-soo is a former bike gang leader who now works as a speedy bike messenger.  One day he is sent to pick up Ah-rom, a major k-pop star, who turns out to be his ex-girlfriend.  She puts on his helmet but while he was away, someone has put a bomb in it.  Now he must do an unknown man’s bidding with the police and an old rival on his tail.

Quick is primarily an action film and it borrows its concept from the popular 90s Hollywood summer blockbuster Speed (1994), starring Keanu Reeves, it has more or less borrowed its name too.  The action is relentless and the filmmakers cram in pile-ups, explosions, and as much speed as they can into the narrative.  I must say that the action sequences are for the most part convincing but they are just variations on a theme and don’t offer us anything we haven’t seen before.  There’s also a tendency to blend the comedy in with the action, these efforts, rather than add up to something better, mostly fall flat.

Funny bikes

Comedy is a large part of Quick but I think it was either a poor choice or badly handled as it is the cause of most of the film’s many problems.  It’s not particularly funny and, as I’ve already mentioned, it doesn’t blend well with the action, but beyond that it poses two significant issues.  Since a lot of the film is played for laughs, there is no real urgency and the stakes feel very low, a big no-no for an action film.  Secondly, I found the two leads to be terrible, mainly because they have no comic timing.  I know that Lee Min-ki’s new film Spellbound as been received very enthusiastically but here he’s just a pretty face and his performance is hamfisted but also very unbalanced, Gi-Soo never felt like a character.  Kang Ye-won’s is not someone I was very familiar with beforehand but I do recognize her from last year’s Hello Ghost and she seems to be a Yoon Je-kyoon stalwart, this being the fourth film of his she has starred in.  Again she is a pretty face who only seems capable of overacting and her grating performance quickly overstays its welcome.

Sexy bikes

Quick does feel like a missed opportunity though.  At times, with all the different factions facing off against eachother, I felt this could have been like an anarchic Kim Sang-jin (Attack the Gas Station, 1999; Kick the Moon, 2001) film but it’s far too consumerist and cynical to pull that off.  The film lacks a raison d’être, it is merrily an excuse for fast vehicles and pyrotechnics but rather than reinvent the genre or offer up an original style from its mise-en-scene, it expects the money being thrown at the stunts and explosions to impress rather than the way in which they are presented.

Forgive the bad pun but I think the film was made a little too quickly, elements designed to draw in viewers were thrown together, explosions littered the marketing, numerous mid-level stars were cast in small roles but at no point was any effort put into the story, the characters, or the style of the film.  What we’re left with looks more like a drawn-out music video than a feature film and that is definitely not what I go to the movies for.

★★☆☆☆

Money shot

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

To keep up with the best in Korean film you can sign up to our RSS Feed, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

Sector 7 (7-gwang-goo) 2011

Straight off the bat I can say that the most anticipated Korean blockbuster of 2011, aside from Christmas’ war epic My Way from Jang Je-gyu, is easily the worst film I’ve seen all year, no matter how you look at it.  It’s very easy to see what went wrong, one bad decision was made after another, with barely any right ones in between.  What is not so easy to understand is how things went wrong.  Though I would not label Sector 7’s filmmakers as the cream of the crop, they normally seem to know what they’re doing and consistently deliver solid, if overly sentimental fare.  They are endowed with a keen ability to whet Korea’s insatiable appetite for melodrama.

Oil rig bonding

Curiously, there is little to no melodrama in Sector 7.  It hints at it a few times but seems to abandon it in favor of concocting a copycat medley of rehashed Hollywood plot devices and production techniques.  It is truly a triumph of expectation over delivery as I cannot imagine any producer seeing a cut of this expensive bomb and proclaiming “We have a hit on our hands!”  The film’s pre-release exposure was enormous, everyone (at least in Korea and on the internet) knew about it being the first Korean 3D IMAX film, numerous posters and trailers were available, and the entertainment rags were all talking up Ha Ji-won’s arduous workout regimen.  When the day came, it opened very strong before the poisonous word of mouth pulled it right back out of theaters within weeks.

Clearly it was the intent of Yoon Je-kyoon (producer/writer) and Kim Ji-hoon (director) to copy every similar film that had met with a lot of success in the hope that their synthetic product would also be a big hit.  Ha Ji-won is basically an Ellen Ripley (Sigourney Weaver’s iconic character in the Alien franchsie) stand-in, the oil rig is from Armageddon (1998), a major character’s death and resurrection is lifted from the first Lord of the Rings, the genesis of the monster is not dissimilar to Korea’s own The Host (2006), and the list goes on.

Ha Ji-won, tough as nails... apparently

In fact, the film is a veritable cornucopia of metanarratives.  Curiously, aside from lifting all of its plot elements, characters, set-pieces, and effects from other movies, it also has a link to the popular K-Drama Secret Garden (2010) which ends with Ha Ji-won’s stuntwoman character being given the script of Sector 7.  Clever synergy?  I suppose so.  Even stranger is that her characters in both the show and the film are identical.  Women that are physically strong but emotionally weak and incapable of making decisions.  Stranger still is that her tragically deceased father is incarnated by Jeong In-gi in both.  Everything about Sector 7 is constructed, even the sets aren’t real as most of it was shot on green screen.  As a result it barely feels like a film and the chief cause of this is just how badly it is made. 

Unlike Yoon’s previous blockbuster, the tsunami-themed Haeundae (2009), Sector 7 spares little time for scene-setting and character development. A brief underwater intro features a pair of oil drillers setting in place a pipe.  A couple of little glowing creatures swim around them, suddenly they attack and one of the men falls to his death.  Fast forward to the present where we are directly introduced to the hardy (but strangely Spartan) crew of an oil rig.  They are battling with a malfunctioning pipe and being doused in brute petroleum, no doubt reinforcing the intrinsic bond between them.  Cha Hae-joon (Ha Ji-won) is pretty but tough as nails and shows grit alongside the men.  A couple of scenes explore the relationships between the rig’s crewmen (and woman), which is to say that nothing happens.  One of those glowing creatures is found and then Anh Suh-kee (Hae-joon’s mentor) comes aboard to aid the exploration of the new underwater oil fields.  Of course he knows more than he lets on and blah blah blah blah blah…

The first of many oil rig bike scenes

What is it that can make a film go oh so wrong?  B-movies, as I’ve explored in my I Am a Dad review, benefit from lowered expectations.  Conversely, when you suffocate the nation’s media outlets for a month, touting your bigger-than-anything-you’ve-ever-seen-before-it blockbuster, you suffer from heightened expectations.  When you go down the latter route but produce a film on par (or below, as is the case) with the former course, you’re left with a big problem that is pretty much irreparable.  You’ve promised something spectacular and eventful but have completely failed to deliver.  Worse than a bad filmmaker, this makes you a liar.

More than anything else, and there’s a lot, two things bothered me the most about Sector 7.  One is the incomprehensibly bad rear-projection technique used in the bike sequences, of which there are four… on an oil rig.  The quality is what you would expect from the 30s or 40s not 2011, worse still is watching Ha Ji-won madly rev the bike and swoop down to her left and right sides, she actually looks like a little 6-year-old boy pretending to ride in a Grand Prix. Yoon, who also produced this summer’s Quick, seems to have a bike fetish.

Sacrifice: LOTR style

The second, and perhaps more upsetting point, is the film’s latent mysoginy.  Hae-joon embodies both male and female traits, the problem is that the male traits are the hero ones, and the female traits are all ugly stereotypes.  Additionally, for a film that attempts to make Ha Ji-won a consummate action star by pitting her as a conquering heroine against a vicious antagonist, the heroics are mostly reserved for the men.  Throughout the film, they are repeatedly sacrificing themselves, one of the characters does so twice! Another does so to save his friend, in what I’m assuming is supposed to be an emotional scene (no such luck).  After he does so, his friend remains rooted to the spot, whimpering, not trying to escape and is then quickly impaled.  In more able hands this might have been a clever send-up but no such attempt is made here, which begs the question, what was the point?

If you decide to get on board Sector 7, here’s what you can expect: wild lapses in logic, rampant misogyny, numerous laughably atrocious rear-projection motorcycle sequences, complete disregard for the natural laws of physiques, risible dialogue and matching delivery, an ugly monster that is never hidden from view, and perpetual references to superior films that it could never hope to match.  Your choice…

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

To keep up with the best in Korean film you can sign up to our RSS Feed, like us on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter.

A Better Tomorrow (무적자, Mujeogja) 2010

Great production values

Song Hae-sung’s A Better Tomorrow is a flashy remake of John Woo’s seminal 1986 classic which tries hard to refigure the tale of brotherly love in a gangster-riddled modern Busan. John Woo served as an executive producer for this film, which is a co-production between South Korea, China, and Japan, something that would not have happened 15 years ago. Budgeted at $8.7 million, this is a pricy affair with excellent production values and some stunning set pieces, the problem is that the plot is so familiar and drawn out that it is difficult to care.

Ju Jin-mo, last seen in Ha Yu’s gay period epic A Frozen Flower (2008), plays the role of a gangster who tries to go straight and win the affection of his cop brother. Like the original the plot is thin and the outcome can be spotted a mile away. However Woo’s version was a seismic blockbuster that revolutionized the Asian film industry by creating a new type of stylized action film that would be emulated for years to come. This Korean update does feature some great gunfight sequences, but they are short and infrequent throughout the 124 minute running time.

The plot is a major problem in this new version as it cuts out some significant elements, such as the younger brother’s love interest, yet is still half an hour longer than the original. The characters do not have much depth and are often lacking in charisma, especially Song Seung-heun who cannot possibly match Chow Yun-Fat’s iconic cool from the original. It is a difficult task to recreate a beloved character and it is often wise to change the protagonist so as not to invite comparison, but Song's incarnation lacks three-dimensional characteristics.

The divide between the brothers

There are a few minor changes from the original: the gangsters deal in arms as opposed to counterfeit money; and the overseas set piece is set in Thailand instead of Taiwan. The most promising change is that the brothers are North Korean defectors, this also sets up the seeds of the younger brother’s resentment as the elder brother abandoned him when he initially defected to the south. While this could be an interesting premise, appropriate attention is not given to North-South tensions and this becomes little more than an afterthought.

One of my favorite things about Korean cinema is its propensity to hop across genres. This style of filmmaking can irk a lot of viewers but is also the reason many western audiences are so transfixed by these films. The Host (2006), Save the Green Planet (2003), My Sassy Girl (2001), and many others exhibit a deft handling of generic conventions as their narratives fly across horror, comedy, sci-fi, melodrama, action, and social commentary. This is also true of films that have not crossed over to western audiences, in fact it is pretty much the style of filmmaking that many have come to associate with South Korea. A Better Tomorrow does not cross genres and the reason I mention this is because it’s a damn shame that it doesn’t. It severely limits itself by working within the confines of an already limited original. It takes away without adding, it tones down instead of taking it to the next level. This wouldn’t bother me so much but there is so much skill and potential from a technical standpoint that I wish they had given themselves more leeway to experiment and add a real Korean touch.

The film looks great and has a couple of great, albeit brief, action sequences but is let down by an obvious and simplified plot, two-dimensional characters, and a horribly misjudged finale. Although the film was a hit in its domestic market (with over 1.5 million admissions), I think that director Song Hae-seong is capable of a lot better. Having previously helmed Calla (1999), Failan (2001), Rikidozan (2004), and Maundy Thursday (2006), by comparison his latest effort seems decidedly by-the-numbers.

★★★☆☆

Solid set pieces

Reviews and features on Korean film appear regularly on Modern Korean Cinema.  For film news, external reviews, and box office analysis, take a look at the Korean Box Office Update, Korean Cinema News and the Weekly Review Round-up, which appear weekly on Monday, Wednesday, and Friday mornings (GMT+1).

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The Man From Nowhere (Ajeossi) 2010

As I previously mentioned, I wasn't very exited about The Man From Nowhere at first but the quiet popularity it has earned gradually managed to sway me, so I sought it out and found some time to watch it last night.  The revenge drama is easily Korea's most popular export to the west, indeed the first Korean film I ever saw was Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance, a multi-faceted revenge that, at the relatively young age I saw it, was the most unremittingly bleak thing I had ever witnessed.  At first I hated it, it upset me so, but I was unable to put it out of my head and a week later I felt compelled to watch it again and this time I was mesmerized by it.  I would go so far as to say that it changed the way I viewed film from that point on.  It's brutality and originality certainly had an impact on me but it was really the way it looked, its setting, and its style that left an impression.  Its working class setting, its pale green hues, its mute protagonist, all these set the quiet scene for the most horrific and unfortunate of acts which contrasted against it like gunshots ringing out in the night.  Many great revenge dramas have come out of Korea since (and many other great films also as I've been making a point of mentioning!): Oldboy, Lady Vengeance, A Bittersweet Life, Princess Aurora among others.  Last year alone we saw the release of three: I Saw the Devil, Bedevilled and The Man From Nowhere.

Tae-shik and So-mi

Lee Jeong-beom's The Man From Nowhere is a very standard revenge drama which relies on three things, its style, its violence, and its star, Won Bin.  I say standard because it really is, this revenge drama is unoriginal and, as has been mentioned elsewhere, is essentially a mash-up of Leon: The Professional and Taken.  Cha Tae-shik is a mysterious pawnbroker with a secret past, his neighbors' daughter, So-mi, forms an attachment with him while her mother gets tangled with a drug and organ dealing ring, leading to her death and her daughter's kidnap.  Tae-shik must then go after So-mi and wreaks havoc along the way.

Among its domestic peers, I think this film is closer to A Bittersweet Life than anything else.  It's plotting is simple, it's protagonist is very stoic, and it's focus is on visuals more than anything else.  The Man From Nowhere lags behind as it is not as gripping.  Its story, while straightforward, spins its wheels a little, and while very stylistic, it lacks the flair of its predecessors.  That being said, it is well shot and the sound, while often a little too pronounced, is very effective.

A villain gets his comeuppance

Despite it flaws, I thoroughly enjoyed The Man From Nowhere.  It occurred to me that the motives for the revenge in this narrative were explained but somewhat lazily.  There is on scene where Tae-Shik is tailing an 'ant' and follows him to an arcade.  He is so focused on the one child that he misses So-mi as she walks right past him.  I understand that from a filmmaker's perspective this is a trope that should get the audience going, a near miss.  To me it felt as though it emblematized the film as a whole.  It could have ended right there but our protagonist is more fueled by a desire for revenge (for what happened to his family), even if it is misdirected, than by an impulse to save his neighbor.  He kills wounded foes when they could be left to go scuttle off and lick their wounds, a stabs people a lot more than is probably necessary.  All to what end?  To avenge, to exact revenge, or to sate an audience's palpable need for brutal violence.  Make no mistake, this film is astonishingly violent.

*SPOILER*

Korean antiheroes letting go

The last shot of the film struck me, as I've seen it a number of times in Korean cinema.  He cries now that it's all over, the Korean male with the scarred past can finally let everything go and express himself.  A quiet, reserved, brutal, emotionless anti-hero is reduced to tears when his history finally catches up with him.  I plan to write a little more on this curious phenomenon.

If you can think of any good examples of strong men crying in Korean films, please let me know in the comments below!