I think I finally figured out why I don’t really care for Korean cinema [A note from Tim of the Future, c. 2017:: “Because you are combative asshole with terrible tastes. Seriously, there was ever a point in my life where I could write ‘I don’t really care for Korean cinema’? I deeply apologise for this review, folks”]. Every film I see from the country is somehow “essentially Korean,” in a way that locks me out from appreciating it fully. Not that being “essentially French” or “essentially Japanese” keeps The Rules of the Game or Tokyo Story from ranking high in my own pantheon of the Great Films. But I understand French and Japanese culture, and I really don’t understand Koren culture, and that’s my failing as a viewer but it doesn’t make me like the films any more.
Which is a lot to say in preparation for reviewing what ends up being a James Bond ripoff.
Taepung [Typhoon] is an action thriller about the tension between North and South Korea. It is extremely difficult to avoid noticing this fact, because the film talks about it constantly. In sum, it’s the story of a North Korean pirate (Jang Dang-Kun) who wants to destroy the peninsula because twenty years earlier, he was kept from entering South Korea (he thinks it is the South’s fault, but the film is agnostic on this point).
Before we get there, though, the film goes on for an hour as a police procedural, in which Lt. Kang Se-Jong (Lee Jung-Jae) investigates the theft of an American nuclear device. I could describe this in detail, or I could say, “cop movie, 1986,” and you’d have the same idea. After a while, he meets the pirate’s cancer-ridden sister (Lee Mi-Yeon), who tells him the whole tragic story of why the bad guy went bad, etc. It’s all very clichéd, but for about 15 minutes, through the pirate’s reunion with his sister, it works on the sheer level of “interesting characters, well-acted.”
The the endless third act begins, and I found myself stuck with a movie that gave me exactly what I wanted, and it was dull. “Pirates, nukes and typhoons” seemed like a can’t-miss idea on paper, but in reality it’s just kind of silly. Long story short, South Korea launches a strike against the pirate ship in the middle of two converging typhoons before the pirate can release nuclear waste into the air.
Kwak Kyung-Taek, the writer director, clearly has not been keeping abreast of the latest developments in action filmmaking. At its best, this feels like a decent Bond movie; at it’s worst it feels like Cobra. The action sequences themselves are competently staged, but particularly unimaginatively: in particular, the final fight – in the cargo hold of a ship with explosions all round, the foes on a scaffold high above the fire – feels like I’ve seen it in every other movie ever.
Some of it’s very pretty, I’ll give it that. For example, the fight above the explosions has some nice silhouettes and things like that. But “pretty” cinematography is only “good” cinematography if it adds anything to the story or theme, and this doesn’t. It’s just pretty.
So why credit such a boilerplate film with being characteristic of all Korean cinema? Because throughout, there are fascinating tiny elements that are just so very specific and intentional, and yet make no sense to me. For example, the film opens in an Austrian embassy in 1983, where two children who are shortly to be severely fucked over are given Christmas gifts. Later, a raft of North Koreans is massacred by an American soldier (they’re bait for the pirate’s nuclear thievery, so it’s really confusing what the morality is here); in one shot the soldier is very obviously wearing a crucifix. I know that the status of Christianity in Korea is rather different than in most of the region; but I feel that these signifiers mean a hell of a lot, and I really don’t get them at all.
And of course, the entire plot is based on the tension between North and South, in particular how one man’s desire to enter the South twists into hate when the South rejects him. Or does it? That’s the thing, there’s a host of issues about the two countries’ relationship that the movie assumes and plays off of, and I can tell that there’s a lot going on that isn’t registering with me at all. Even the standard climactic bit about the villain and the hero being two sides of the same coin is invested with this Korean-ness.
All this doesn’t make it a good film. I want to make that clear.