We need to pay more attention to South Korean cinema; their espionage thrillers are much better than anything cranked out by Hollywood lately.
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| Han Ji-hoon (Park Hae-soo, back to camera) gets nothing but scornful dismissal from the black ops team he has just met: from left, Jae-gyu (Song Jae-lim), Hui-won (Lee El), Manager Hong (Yang Dong-keun), Jeong-dae (Park Jim-young) and Ji Gang-in (Sul Kyung-gu) |
It’s also fascinating to see an entirely different cultural approach to espionage issues: points of view wholly unlike the usual American take on the Far East.
The premise from scripters Ahn Sang-hoon and Na Hyun is irresistible: An idealistic, by-the-book civilian suddenly gets tossed among a ruthless black-ops team accustomed to street justice in pursuit of the greater good. Our naïve protagonist is horrified by the extremes exercised by his new companions, just as they’re thoroughly disgusted by his namby-pamby faith in a broken system.
Meanwhile, all concerned are trying to ferret out a mole who’s been compromising Korean National Intelligence Service (NIS) operations.
Following a brief and violent prologue — the significance of which becomes clear only later — we meet Han Ji-hoon (Park Hae-soo), a buttoned-down prosecutor with Seoul’s Central District Prosecutor’s Office. He’s in the final stages of indicting Lee Chan-young (Choi Won-young), the obviously corrupt chairman of the Sangin Group; the case seems air-tight…
…until a procedural error is revealed.
Chairman Lee walks free; Ji-hoon is humiliated. (Choi milks this moment with maximum condescending smarm.)
Desperate to regain his professional stature, Ji-hoon accepts an unusual assignment from Yeom Jeong-won (Jin Kyung), director of NIS foreign intelligence activities. She’s troubled by reports coming from a black ops team headed by Ji Gang-in (Sul Kyung-gu) in Shenyang, China; the intel feels … wrong. Fabricated. Too benign to be true.
Believing this is just the sort of task for which his skills are best suited, Ji-hoon heads to Shenyang and liaises with Section Manager Hong (Yang Dong-keun). The latter encourages this young upstart to forget the assignment, enjoy the sights for awhile, and then file a neutral report. Incensed, Ji-hoon demands to accompany Gang-in — who prefers the nickname Yaksha — and his team on their next mission.
Nobody wants anything to do with this interloper, contemptuously dubbed “Nike” by Yaksha. And, indeed, Ji-hoon is horrified by how the subsequent skirmish goes down; he threatens to file scathing reports on all concerned.
Yaksha’s team — Jae-gyu (Song Jae-lim), Jeong-dae (Park Jin-young) and Hui-won (Lee El) — ask if they can kill this asinine idiot. (Glancing at their grim faces, Ji-hoon suspects they’re serious.) But although Yaksha shares their scornful opinion, he’s mordantly amused by Ji-hoon’s foolish stubbornness.
But only to a point. When Ji-hoon’s insufferable efforts at protocol keep screwing things up, the team’s patience quickly wears thin.
The political dynamics are fascinating. Yaksha’s lover, Ryun Hee (Jim Seo-yeon), runs a restaurant in Shenyang; she’s also an intelligence officer of the North Korean Security Agency (and he’s well aware of this). When it comes to spycraft, the two Koreas are inclined to work together — off the radar — against Japan, their common enemy.
Yaksha has long been after an NIS mole working for the Japanese spy service: an individual responsible for the deaths, four years earlier, of his former team. Yaksha also wants to obtain valuable intel from a former double agent, Moon Byung-uk (Nam Kyung-eup) … but nobody knows where he is.
Sul is note-perfect as the world-weary, impressively resourceful Yaksha, whose hardened gaze reflects too much loss, and too many betrayals. Although the man is graced with the luck and quick reflexes of long experience, there’s also a trace of death-wish in Sul’s expression: a willingness to sacrifice himself, should that become necessary.
Park’s Ji-hoon is both hilarious and insufferable: such an officious, stuck-up horse’s ass. (It’s a constant struggle: On the one hand, we can’t help feeling sorry for the guy … but we also want to reach into the screen and slap some sense into him) His frequent expressions of disbelief and outrage fight a constant battle with his desire to maintain dignity and composure, neither of which is appropriate under such conditions.
The story’s frequent melees and gun battles are intercut with the ongoing war of personality between Ji-hoon and the others: a blend that makes this otherwise bullet-laden romp far more entertaining than (as an obvious example) the soul-dead Ambulance. We quickly grow to care about these characters.
Song, Park and Lee initially are little more than two-legged weapons, but even they become distinct and relatable, as they grudgingly begin to accept Ji-hoon as a troublesome mascot. Song is the most impatient, frequently knocking Ji-hoon around if necessary; Park, newest to the team, is more willing to cut their mascot some slack. Lee, in turn, is a total bad-ass.
Hiroyuki Ikeuchi is marvelously malevolent as Yoshinobu Ozawa, the sort of master villain who’d be right at home in a James Bond epic. Lee Soo-kyung, finally, navigates an impressive range of emotions as Moon’s plucky daughter, Ju-yeon.
As is typical of Asian thrillers, gun battles often give way to the sort of slickly choreographed, mänö ä mänö martial arts skirmishes that’ll please Jackie Chan fans. Several of the more ambitious gun battles are staged equally well: most notably a running melee taking place on both sides of a huge residential complex, and (later) the climactic tussle in a massive chemical plant.
Hyeon also isn’t shy about blowing stuff up. Which he does with considerable panache.
By the time we reach the exciting, explosive denouement, with actual good guys and bad guys finally revealed, we’re seriously invested in the outcome. And if the final scene dangles the possibility of a sequel, I say bring it on.
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