Steel Rain (2017)

Steel Rain (2017)
Original Title: 강철비
Translation: Steel Rain

 

Starring: Jung Woo-sung, Kwak Do-won, Kim Kap-su, Kim Eui-sung, Lee Kyung-young, Jo Woo-jin, Kim Myung-gon, Park Eun-hye, Won Jin-ah, Lee Jae-yong, Kristen Dalton
Director: Yang Woo-seok
Action Director: Choe Bong-rok

 

My main problem about Korean movies—and bear in mind I’ve seen only a small number of them compared to the Chinese-Hong Kong-Taiwanese movies on my list—is that all the ones I want to watch run about 140 minutes on average. That’s…very long. It’s hard to just sit down and watch a Korean movie for fun; I have to guarantee that my movie-watching time isn’t too late and that I’m not too exhausted from staring listlessly at a screen for eight hours in order to do so for another two and a half. Three of the last four Korean movies I’ve seen—this, Time to Hunt, and The Fortress—have all had a run time of 140 minutes. Steel Rain comes the closest to justifying such a length, being one of the best political action-thrillers that has come out of that peninsula since the landmark Shiri (1999).

I think making intelligent political thrillers comes almost naturally to (South) Korean filmmakers, considering their geopolitical situation. Their immediate neighbor is the totalitarian Communist rogue nation we know as North Korea, with whom they have (technically) been at war with for more than 70 years—both countries are technically in a state of cease-fire, as opposed to an outright armistice. They are also located (essentially) right next to China, another authoritarian Communist state with one of the world’s most powerful militaries and largest economies (never mind the current uncertainty, if you believe the videos of David Zhang). With so many enemies at its front and back doors, there is an ever-present danger of sorts to this people, especially considering Kim Jong-un’s (and his psychotic sister’s) belligerent threats of nuclear warfare. It’s that uneasy “peace” between South Korea and its neighbors that serves as great inspiration for political thrillers.

There is a lot of plot in this particular film. The movie begins with a former North Korean agent, Eom Chul-woo (Jung Woo-sung, Musa: The Warrior and The Good, the Bad and the Weird), being brought out of retirement by his former boss, RGB chief Ri Tae-han (Kim Kap-soo, A Tale of Two Sisters). Ri gives him an impossible mission: assassinate two important military officers. Both men are preparing a coup d’état to topple “Number One” (also referred to as “the Supreme Leader” and “the Great General”, but never by the name Kim Jong-un). Unfortunately, they occupy rungs on the ladder higher than General Ri, so he has no way to inform Number One about their plot.

While that is going on, South Korea is just going through elections, with the challenger (Lee Kyun-young, of The Pirates) beating the incumbent (Kim Eu-Sung, from Train to Busan). This is told from the perspective of the Foreign Affairs Secretary, Kwak Chul-woo (Kwak Do-won, of The Wailing and The Man from Nowhere), a genius in his area, but pretty much a failure as a family man. His plastic surgeon wife—this detail will come into play later—has left him and he’s too busy on the phone with politicians to pay attention to his children. However, both countries will come to depend on his know-how and connections to avoid the resurgence of the Korean War.

It starts when Eom Chul-Woo (both protagonists have the same given name) is tasked with killing the head of the Royal Guard, Park Kwang-dong during a visit to a China-financed industrial complex located near the DMZ. Eom hides out in the ventilation system the day before, ready to snipe him at a distance as soon as his car arrives. To his surprise, the visitor is actually Number One, with Park nowhere to be seen. At this point, the rebelling arm of the military fires a pair of stolen American missiles known as “Steel Rain” into the crowd. These weapons are particularly brutal: the warheads split into dozens of cluster bombs, all of which explode and scatter razor-sharp shrapnel all over. Hundreds of civilians—mainly young women who were receiving the Supreme Leader—are hewn down in the explosions. Park then sends his men to the scene of the blast to kill all the survivors, including the Great General, who has been seriously wounded. Comrade Eom leaps into action and trades bullets with the soldiers as he tries to get Number One to safety. He and two young women are able to get the Great General into a delivery truck and head for the South Korean border.

Once in South Korea, Eom stops the truck at the first clinic he sees, which happens to be staffed by an obstetrician. Naturally, she isn’t equipped to deal with this sort of problem but does her best to attend to her prestigious patient: she closes up one wound, removes shrapnel from another, but is ultimately unable to get the piece of steel lodged in his head. While waiting for General Ri to send reinforcements, Eom comes face to face with a bunch of assassins working for Park. After a pitched fight between Eom and the killers, he, the girls, the doctor and the Supreme Leader have to flee. The doctor leads them to another clinic, which happens to be run by Kwak’s ex-wife. Once news of the bloodbath at the obstetrician’s clinic reaches Kwak’s ears, he finds out that his ex was the last person this doctor contacted. It’s time for him to have a first meeting with Eom. But both men will soon learn that the coup d’état was about a lot more than a simple transfer of power. It promises to change the entire face of geopolitics in East Asia forever…

Steel Rain is not in any way a casual movie to watch, at least not the first times. It is a complex and involved political thriller populated with LOTS of characters, most of whom are well developed and realistic, trying to deal with potentially world-changing developments. There only a few moments of levity where the film gives itself a moment to breathe, and even those help make both protagonists more relatable. Those are funny in subtle ways, with two men from rival countries enjoying a nice meal and bitching about G-Dragon. Kwak treats the events going on around him with a casual sense of humor, which irritates Eom to no end, but the man is mainly hiding his own anxiety. That said, he is still the best person in all of South Korea to deal with the escalating tension between the two sibling nations, between his natural intellect, foreign connections, and impeccable academic understanding of local history. Eom initially can’t see it, but eventually the two develop a bond, which is believable because the film gives them the appropriate amount of screen time to interact, while letting both men see the other action.

Although the film is deadly serious in terms of the implications of its story, there are some moments of dark humor running through course of the story. This really comes to the fore when we meet the two girls who unwittingly accompany Eom Chul-woo to South Korea. As one might expect from a totalitarian state where the leader is presented as a deity to its citizens, they react with the sort of fangirl enthusiasm to the mere presence of Number One that an American may reserve for Taylor Swift, but never for a politician. This is especially amusing when you get to the blood transfusion sequence. Also, when you consider the backward lifestyle of the average North Korean citizen, where starvation appears to be a constant threat and concern, their reaction to microwave food is priceless. And realistically, all the female characters gradually disappear from the narrative, not because of any writing error, but because there comes a point a point in a political crisis where there is no plausible reason for a civilian to hang around the political bigwigs doing their thing. Most Hollywood action movies keep the leading lady around because the hero needs someone to fall for, but this film has no room for it’s-in-the-script romance.

There is the question of whether or not the film earns its 140-minute running time. For the most part, it does. On one hand, you could probably edit out the lulls in which the two Chul-woo’s are bonding over South Korean culture. That would probably shave off almost a half-hour of the running time, keep the tension constant, and not affect the main plot at all. But if you did that, then you’d miss a bit of the richer character moments that make you root for these men so much.

There are a handful of action sequences, including the attack on the factory complex, a fight sequence at the clinic, and a final assault on the hospital. The set pieces were staged by Choe Bong-rok, who appears to be a veteran to action since the South Korean cinematic renaissance in 1999. He has acted in films like Crying Fist and Fists of Legend. He also did stuntwork in The Villainess and I Saw the Devil. More importantly, he has worked on the action in movies like Time to Hunt; The Tiger: An Old Hunter’s Tale; and other, plus “Other Crew” credits on City of Violence and The Restless. There are two fight sequences, which resemble the realistic “Special Forces” approach to screen fighting that we’ve seen in movies since The Bourne Identity, but are portrayed here without all of the quick cuts and rapid-fire editing that the other series is known for. The fights are perfectly visible and staged with quickness and gusto. Eom Chul-woo is just as deadly with a scapel as he is with a semi-automatic handgun. The big shootout in the hospital is reminiscent of the one in Hard Boiled, although the N. Korean killers are far deadlier than Anthony Wong’s cannon-fodder cronies in that film. You watch these movies with North Korean agents kicking all sorts of capitalist ass and you wonder what that country would be like if the Kim Dynasty spent the same amount of effort in feeding their people that they spend in training agents and assassins—and that is even brought up by one of the characters. I should watch more of these South Korean political action films because, between this and Shiri, they really know what they’re doing.