The Yellow Sea (**3/4)

I made a point of seeing this at the Philadelphia Film Festival because it was South Korean director Na Hong-jin’s follow-up to The Chaser, one of the best action films of the last decade.

In this case, Chaser star Jung-Woo Ha plays a hapless Chinese taxi driver and gambler offered a contract killing job to pay off his debts. Both the driver and his intended victim are ethnic Koreans, but the driver lives in a Korean enclave just north of the Korean peninsula, while the man he plans to kill is in South Korea.


I strongly preferred the first half, which shows the driver’s being perilous transported into South Korea, stalking his prey, and making inquiries about his wife, who had already left China in search of work. Although only background to the story, it’s an interesting parallel with American immigration issues. The driver has to work so as not to appear like a rube, as immigrants everywhere sometimes do to those more assimilated.

The second half will no doubt appeal to real action junkies. With less time given to sentimental concerns, it ups the violence quotient significantly. One thing different about many Asian action films—versus Hollywood ones—is that films like this don’t mind making the hero unsavory, or the violence seem as brutal as it is. Here, not only are guns a rarity, so you get a lot of murders with knives and other implements (and lots of blood), but even the car crashes feel louder and crunchier, frightening like a real car crash, if you’ve been in one. Technically, the movie seemed pretty flawless, but way too brutal for my taste. Once the main character’s transformation from meek cabbie to fearless killer is complete, I lost some interest, although there are twists and turns as he becomes the target of a slew of Korean and Chinese mafioso. Too bad, because the final sequence is very well done.

IMDb link

viewed 10/28/11 9:15 at Ritz East [Philadelphia Film Festival screening] and reviewed 12/3/11

The Limits of Control (**1/4)

Jim Jarmusch is one of the few film directors who may be (slightly) better known than any of the films he’s made, which include Down by Law, Ghost Dog: The Way of the Samurai, and, most recently, Broken Flowers, which managed to gross over $13 million in the United States. Despite that modest success, Jarmusch has moved no closer to the mainstream, and this faux-noir drama maintains the minimalist style his films exemplify.

My feeling watching this was that Jarmusch had gotten ahold of a half-finished David Mamet script and stretched it out to a two-hour length. Specifically, there is a stylish, sophisticated, nearly silent lead (Isaach De Bankolé, possibly employing his native Ivory Coast accent) who is sent to Spain. Maybe he’s a hit man, maybe an art thief, maybe it doesn’t matter. He meets a series of persons, each of whom greets him by asking whether he speaks Spanish (he doesn’t), leaves him with a scrap of paper, and in between imparts a bit of philosophy. Jarmusch seems to get self-referential when one (Tilda Swinton in femme fatale mode) says that she likes it when actors don’t say anything. She likes Hitchcock too, but if you know Jarmusch you won’t be expecting any high-tension conclusion. And there isn’t, although the the plot is sort of tied up, if not entirely explained.

Jarmusch hasn’t so much made a movie as a collection of influences—the 1967 film Point Blank, for one—and recurring motifs, including song lyrics, matchboxes, a mysterious, nude young woman, expresso orders, and the tai chi practiced by the lead. It is to a normal thriller as tai chi is to ice hockey. Of course, the director’s movies have all been deliberately paced, but this one is also repetitive and pretentious. It’s very stylish, and strikingly shot; the meaning of the characters and the symbolism and the location and the murder—there is one—should provide hours of fodder for those thusly inclined. But by the time the credits rolled, I wasn’t.

IMDB link

viewed 5/24/09 at Ritz 5 and reviewed 5/28/09

In Bruges (***)

I’ve never understood why people like seeing the same old locations over and over again. Playwright-cum-filmmaker Martin McDonagh must have thought that too. Inspired by a trip to what’s referred to here as the “best-preserved medieval town in he whole of Belgium,” he decided to set a comedy-thriller about a couple of Irish hit men there. Brendan Gleeson is the older and wiser of the two, an old pro who relishes the opportunity to do a little sightseeing, while Colin Farrell is the neophyte, whose interest in Belgian culture extends only to the beer and the women. (“If I’d grown up on a farm and was retarded, Bruges might impress me, but I didn’t, so it doesn’t.”)

As the two partners in crime await the call from their boss (Ralph Fiennes), who’s sent them to the Flemish city to hide out after a botched job, they bicker, sightsee, drink, and somehow pick a fight with a dwarf who’s in town filming a movie. While edging toward buddy comedy on the one hand, it has a serious side also, and it is this that drives the climax, which moves into thriller territory. The one thing missing is anything about Belgium. Entirely in English, the movie merely uses the locale for scenery.

There’s something contrived about the plotting, especially the too-perfect, almost Shakespearean ending, and these guys seem a bit too nice to be hit men, but it’s undeniably clever, and the comedy comes naturally off the interplay of the two principals. Offering a little something for every taste, this is a good movie for people disagreeing about what to see.

IMDB link

viewed 2/7/08; reviewed 2/14/08

No Country for Old Men (***1/2)

Joel and Ethan Coen harken back to their first film, Blood Simple, with their adaptation of Cormac McCarthy’s Texas murder tale. Josh Brolin, who played a different sort of greedily reckless character in American Gangster, is great as a hunter who finds a couple of million in cocaine money. But it’s Javier Bardem, as a sociopoathic killer-for-hire who dispatches his victims with a bolt gun, who you won’t forget. Bardem’s creepy demeanor and deep voice practically had me quaking in my seat. The two men play cat and dog across south Texas. It’s like a western with cars instead of horses (there’s a couple of those too, though), or like a film noir with a couple of less hard-boiled characters (Tommy Lee Jones’s as a sheriff and Kelly McDonald’s as the wife of Brolin’s character). The Coen brothers effectively use light and shadow, and a minimum of dialogue, to maintain the tension for at least 90 minutes. The last act is more philosophical, and may be a letdown for those expecting an explosive finale.

IMDB link

reviewed 11/13/07

Crank (***)

 ? This cross-breeding of Speed and Run Lola Run has one of the ultimate high-concept action plots. Jason Statham (the Brit best known for the Transporter movies) is a hit man who’s been injected with a “Beijing cocktail” that will kill him unless he can keep adrenaline flowing through his system. Amy Smart plays the girlfriend who’s in the dark about both his profession and his unfortunate predicament.

+ One advantage of the plot is that it allows Statham’s character to do all sorts of bad things but still seem sympathetic. He’s got to snort cocaine, or drive his car through a mall, for example, to keep the juice flowing through him long enough to seek revenge. Variety in the action scenes and some editing tricks like split screens will help you get past the silliness. So does some low-key humor, like the way a cabbie’s radio plays “Achy Breaky Heart” as the hero’s own threatens to quit on him. Crank is the same sort of enjoyable fluff as the Transporter and its sequel, yet the surprising ending is very nearly existential.

- I’m pretty sure the filmmakers didn’t spend a bundle on medical consultants, but you weren’t expecting documentary reality here, were you? I did think the last third of the movie could have been a little less violent, though that may not be every action fan’s taste. The film also seemed too dark or muddy, even though most of it takes place in daylight.

= *** A quick hit for the action-movie junkie.

IMDb link