Film Reviews

The Yellow Sea

• Rating:
• Director: Hong-jin Na
• Starring:
• Details: South Korea / 140mins (18).

Fox International are dipping their toe in foreign movies that they think will play for a more mainstream-inclined audience. If the mainstream audience have an inclination towards everyone in the cast being stabbed – and I mean everyone – then The Yellow Sea should clean up.
Living in crime-ridden Yanji, the capital of the Yanbian Korean Autonomous Prefecture, doesn't afford Gu-nam (Ha), a taxi driver with a gambling addiction, the chances to get out of the debt his wife left him in before she scarpered to Seoul. He's has no other choice than to accept a dangerous job from local gangster Myung (Kim): he's to be smuggled to South Korea to carry out a hit. Gu-nam has ten days to complete the task at hand and since most of that is scoping out his target's apartment, he uses the time to track down his wife…
This opening half hour or so is lean stuff; director Na doesn't divulge a lot of information apart from poor guy/needs money/wife gone/dangerous job, and this sparse story telling is fun despite the gloominess on show. Even when twists happen upon twists and take the story off on wild goose chases Na doesn't show his hand as to where it's going to go. Na delights in flipping the audience's expectations constantly. One typical scene sees three armed men (armed with carving knives – no guns in this movie) creep into a victim's hotel room in the middle of the night. There are shouts and screams in the darkness. When the light is turned on, the three armed men are now unarmed and bleeding on the floor while their 'victim' stands alone in the middle of the room clutching a bloody hatchet.
This is fine when it's just Gu-nam's story, but when The Yellow Sea branches out to take in Myung, South Korean gangster Kim (Cho) and the Seoul police hunting everyone down, the story gets confusing: what everyone is doing and why they are doing soon get lost in the mess. Na's tactic is when things get puzzling is to have everyone stab everyone – and I mean everyone – and start over again. It's a movie of two halves. The first half is a patient thriller in the Hitchcock vein and the second half is a violent, no holds barred, bloody massacre where Na substitutes shootouts with up-close-and-personal knife fights.
There are too many instances where Gu-nam fights his way out inescapable situations and the plot loses the run of itself, but if you like your Bourne car chases, realistic fight scenes where everyone gets stabbed – and I mean everyone – and lashings of misanthropic pessimism, check this out.

Review by Gavin Burke