Last Updated on September 28, 2020 by rob
Lee Jung-Chool (Song Kang-ho), a Korean police captain working under the Japanese occupation of Korea in the 1920’s is ordered to hunt down a group of resistance fighters who plan to smuggle explosives into the capital. When Lee poses as a businessman and accompanies his chief suspect on a trip he ends up persuaded into switching sides after an unexpected meeting with the resistance’s leader. But Lee finds the safety of himself and his new comrades threatened by his fanatical Japanese partner Hashimoto (Um Tae-goo) who has his own informer inside the resistance.
Notable as South Korea’s first co-production with Warner Brothers’ Korean arm this is a polished action thriller from a writer/director (of I Saw The Devil and A Tale of Two Sisters fame) I’ve always found rather overrated but who with this delivers his best film to date. If the specifics are occasionally unclear at least the overall gist of what’s going on in this cat and mouse tale of heroic freedom fighters, barbaric Japanese invaders and a morally conflicted policeman who works for the enemy but then switches sides, is never in doubt. The performances are all confident and assured even if none of the characters are well enough written that they prove all that emotionally engaging. The film has something in common with the recent Dunkirk in both that respect and its impressive state of the art production values.
There’s lots of atmospheric period detail and plenty of thrilling set pieces to keep the viewer entertained here, the best of which is a nail-biting hunt for the resistance on board a packed train. It’s a sequence surging with suppressed violence which finally explodes in a spectacularly grisly shootout. But with the exception of Song Kang-ho’s copper, who finds himself in the position of having to prove himself to his Japanese superiors by carrying out a horrific torture session on the resistance’s sole female agent, Gye-soon (Han Ji-min) the film’s writer/director doesn’t seem much interested in any of the characters. That’s a shame but at least who’s good and who’s bad is clearly delineated so there’s never all that much doubt about who to hiss and who to cheer. An abundance of plot twists, startling bursts of splatteriffic violence and a rousing revenge finale scored to Ravel’s Bolero combine to good effect and will likely leave most viewers feeling satisfied.
