THE YELLOW SEA - MIFF 2011

“The Yellow Sea” is the follow-up to director Na Hong-Jin’s enormously successful film, “The Chaser” (which I actually thought was quite overrated).  When the film begins we meet Gu-Nam, a taxi-driver, who lives in a Chinese border town where the boundaries of China, North Korea and Russia intersect.  This is a town that cares little for laws and human life.  Gu-Nam is struggling to pay back debts stemming from his gambling losses, as well as for a visa he is trying to acquire for his wife who is still back in South Korea, and who mysteriously hasn’t been able to be reached for months.  When he is offered the chance to have his debt swiped clean in exchange for murdering a wealthy businessman back in South Korea, he accepts.  He is then illegally smuggled back into Korea and told that he has exactly ten days to finish the job as that is when the return boat back to China is leaving.  To say that things do not go as planned is an understatement of the fullest measure, and soon enough Gu-Nam has the police, a world full of gangsters and his initial employer of the job, on his tail.

I really loved the way this film started, I was hooked from the get-go, but unfortunately it suffers from what I call “The Dark Knight Syndrome” which is when a film has its best scenes right in the middle of the film and doesn’t have the ability to match it in the finale.  All the way up to the assassination attempt is all brilliant and thrilling stuff, especially a (dialogue-free) sequence when Gu-Nam is working out exactly how he will kill the man, fleshing out every detail as well as trying to work out the flaws of his plan.  While the initial chase scene is also exciting, the longer the film goes on, the less effective it becomes.  It also starts to get overly complicated and confusing as more characters are introduced, and certain character’s motivations seem to blur.  The film also gets extremely violent and is very graphic in its depiction of the violence, which as time went on, I actually started to react against.  It just seemed to be violence for violence sake.  Another problem I had with the film was that the two main characters seemed to have a “Superman” complex because nothing seemed to stop them.  They could be in a massive five car pile-up and the only two people to walk away from the accident would be our “hero” and “villain”.  They could be hacked with a hatchet a few times and still get up, it just became ridiculous and broke the illusion of reality.

I was also confused as to whether or not this film was shot on actual film or digitally, because there were definitely parts of it that were shot digitally and these scenes looked absolutely terrible.  The main car chase was all digital and it made the film look so cheap and amateurish.  Also Na Hong-Jin has got to stop using “shaky cam” for his action scenes because there were times when it was just impossible to know what was going on during the action scenes, which was also a major problem of his previous film “The Chaser”.

I just want to briefly mention that the version of “The Yellow Sea” that was screened at MIFF was the 140 minute “international version”.  The “Korean” version actually runs 157 minutes, and while I am not sure what is in those extra seventeen minutes, I can safely say that the film would have been miles too long at that running time (I already feel the 140 minutes to be too long).  I should also mention that director Na Hong-Jin’s preferred version of the film is the “international version”, so I am happy that that was what was screened at MIFF.  

Overall, I loved the first half of this film and thought it was destined to be another South Korean classic, but unfortunately the longer it went on and the more violent it got, the less I cared for the film and its characters.

3.5 Stars.