Desperate times call for desperate measures and dire consequences when strapped-for-cash cab driver Gu-nam (Ha Jung-woo), a resident of Yanji City, accepts a murder contract to pay off his debts. The arrangement, orchestrated by local gangster Myun-ga (Kim Yun-seok), seems simple: Gu-nam is to travel to Korea (where his wife disappeared to a year earlier, and from whom he hasn’t heard since) and kill a businessman. Gu-nam has 10 days to commit the murder, and to provide his employer with proof in the form of the businessman’s severed thumb. Deep in financial debt aggravated by his Mah-jong losing streak, Gu-nam has no choice but to agree to the deal. While he signs up for the killing, his own agenda is, of course, to locate and reunite with his wife. He clings to the idea of a loyal wife even though he is haunted by his own imagining of her infidelity, while his own mother tells him that his wife is most certainly prostituting herself in Korea.
To be sure, The Yellow Sea is all about illusions, about people making decisions on what they think they know while entering, in fact, some sort of existential and violent freefall. One such illusion is indeed the one of loyalty; The Yellow Sea sets up the basic premise described above, and then complicates everything by throwing in (not entirely unexpectedly) a series of betrayals. The film plays with the familiar but fertile idea of a man caught up in something much larger than himself, struggling to retain a semblance of control as best laid plans are overturned and the world comes apart around him.
Director Na Hong-jin, who gained fame with his nail biter The Chaser and who also wrote the screenplay for this film, has as much an eye for visuals as fellow countryman Kim Ji-woon, although Hong-jin does not stylise and saturate his images to the point of draining them of colour. He has a knack for pacing, and The Yellow Sea (the title is the name of the final chapter in the film) is two and a half hours of accomplished suspense drama, even if the film overstays its welcome. After so much bloodshed and destruction (which I’ll get to soon), it’s a pity that the film seems to lose direction as the ends draws nearer. There are symbolic reasons for what Na Hong-jin does to Gu-nam, but they’re rather anticlimactic in a film so explicitly plot driven.
I mentioned bloodshed. Once the violence starts, it appears regularly with bursts of energy and arterial spray. The characters in the film favour knives and other hand-to-hand weapons, which mean much close combat (though nothing as breathtaking as in Oldboy, even though a scene in The Yellow Sea is obviously inspired by that masterpiece’s hallway fight scene) and litres of blood. Faces are covered in it, bodies are floating in it, and Na Hong-jin revels in all of it. The film seems to struggle with whether it’s aiming for a certain realism or not, because while much of the film would affirm that it does, there’s an occasional glee to the violence that suggests it’s not. In that sense, the film is never as disturbing as, say, I Saw the Devil.
Where The Chaser is a lean, contained thriller with an evil villain and a shady cop protagonist – the film exemplifies the type of genre film Hollywood does not excel at making anymore - The Yellow Sea is hard-boiled, more epic in scope, more convoluted and without a hero in sight.
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