Time to Hunt (2020)

Time to Hunt (2020)
Original Title: 사냥의 시간
Translation: Time of the Hunt

 

Starring: Lee Je-hoon, Ahn Jae-hong, Choi Woo-sik, Park Jeong-min, Park Hae-soo
Director: Yoon Sung-hyun
Action Director: Choe Bong-rok

Another day, another South Korean film that runs in excess of 130-minutes.

What we have here is something of a heist/cat-and-mouse action thriller set in a pre-apocalyptic South Korea, not too unlike the Japan that we see in Blood Heat. Like that movie, the problem is mainly driven by a failing economy as opposed to nuclear weapons, viruses, or zombies. In the context of Time to Hunt, South Korea has defaulted on its International Monetary Fund loans, which I assume the country tried to pay off by printing out of outrageous sums of won. As with Germany following WW2, the result is hyper-inflation that is driving people into the streets to protest, pushing the government into police state status. And since the won is largely useless now, there has been no foreign investment, causing the industrial sector to go belly up. Now, the government is trying to stabilize currency by prohibiting the exchange of won for dollars, although some entities still have their stockpiles (i.e. banks, clandestine casinos, etc.).

It is in this setting that we meet our main characters. Ki-hoon (Choi Woo-sik, of Parasite and Train to Busan) and his slow-witted partner Jang-ho (Ahn Jae-hong, of “Kingdom”), are a couple of street hustlers who are eking out an existence in Seoul. They are living off the proceeds from a big job they committed three years ago, but money is running out fast. And they have a criminal record, so if employment is sparse for regular people, imagine what it’d be for people with shady pasts. When we meet them, they heading over to the local prison to pick up their best friend, Jun-seok (Lee Je-hoon, of Phantom Detective and “Secret Door”). Jun-seok took the fall for them during that aforementioned job and is finally being released.

Upon discovering that their money is worth nothing and that their dollar stash is running dangerously low, Jun-seok makes a proposal: perform a final job to get them enough money to get the hell out of South Korea and emigrate to Taiwan, where things are still peachy keen, economy-wise (one assumes that Xi Jinping died of a “heart attack” before reunification plans could commence). He suggests that they bust into a clandestine casino, where a former fourth member of their team, Sang-soo (Park Jeong-min, of Fists of Legend and Deliver Us from Evil), works as a waiter. Sang-soo owes an outrageous sum to Jun-seok, who is willing to forgive the debt if he gets in on the job.

The four ne’er-do-wells meticulously plan out the heist and visit an ex-con friend of Jun-seok to get themselves some powerful weaponry that will really intimidate the establishment’s security guards. The heist goes as planned for the most part, right down to Jang-ho remembering to steal the hard drives with all the CCTV footage so that they won’t be able to find out who was responsible. However, there is a slight snag to that bit of forethought and insight: the CCTV footage on those hard drives also has all the footage of VIPs and police higher-ups visiting the casino. Without them, there’s no material with which to blackmail the “good guys” whenever they need a favor or two. So, the casino owners—who remain faceless throughout the film—hire a methodical killer named Han (Park Hae-soo, of “Squid Game” and Yaksha: Ruthless Operations) to retrieve the hard drives and “tie up all the loose ends.” Our heroes may be well-armed, but they are certainly not prepared the ordeal awaiting them…

There are two questions to be asked about a film like Time to Hunt upon reaching its conclusion. The first one is “Does the dystopian setting contribute meaningfully to the movie in any way?” The answer is “Sorta.” I mean, it does provide our characters with a surplus of abandoned buildings to hide out in throughout the running time. It goes some way to explain why our characters are financially screwed early on, but honestly, that could’ve been treated via other narrative details without having to set the movie in the near-future. I guess it was needed as a way to give the film an oppressive atmosphere suitable for the oppressive atmosphere of our antiheroes’ plight, but the background details of South Korea’s economic collapse don’t contribute much to the story itself.

The other question is whether or not the film deserves its 134-minute running time. The answer to that is “Not quite.” I’m pretty sure you could have edited out the third-act subplot involving the brother of the arms dealer and not lost anything at all. This is especially because that character (and his cronies) show up briefly when they are introduced, and then get to fire a bunch of guns at the villainous Han at the climax. They really do not add anything to the narrative that could’ve been relegated to Jun-seok and his cohorts. There are probably a handful of scenes that could have been trimmed down by a few seconds here and there that would have contributed to the narrative being a lot tighter without losing much in the overall story.

Where Time to Hunt shines, and this is mainly thanks to writer-director-editor Yoon Sung-hyun and cinematographer Lim Won-guen (who was nominated for an award for this), is a combination of the visuals and tension generated by them. Connoisseurs of martial arts cinema like me often complain about bad lighting in movies whenever it obscures the action scenes. There is a lot of darkness in this film, but it is shot artfully in that every shadow becomes a reason to generate suspense and tension. Just watch the sequence in the parking garage—or the previous scene at the bar—and you’ll see just how scary an ill-lit location can be. Lim also likes to soak scenes in red filters, almost like some of the more beautiful sequences in Dario Argento’s Suspiria, but contrast the Gothic architecture of Argento’s films with the rundown, post-industrial age jungle of this film. Yoon Sung-hyun also writes Han to be such an intimidating villain that he’s just as frightening to us the viewer as he is to viewer, even when he’s not on screen.

Speaking of writing, one of the other strengths of the film is the characters. They are not especially deep, but their camaraderie is palpable throughout. Jung-seok is a hardened criminal, but he is faithful to his friends, even when he finds out that the money they stole that put him in prison in the first place is no longer around. He truly cares about his friends, even Sang-soo, whom he was initially angry at for stiffing him on owed money. Jung-seok is often willing to lie in order to protect his friends, especially the not-particular-smart Jang-ho. Both Jung-seok and Ki-hoon are especially sympathetic in terms of their patience for their friend, in spite of his intellectual shortcomings. That sort of loyalty makes these characters sympathetic, despite their skirting about the law when it comes to their actions.

The most unexpected aspect of this film is the ending. I won’t spoil it, but it doesn’t really the end the way you might expect it to. It does, however, make sense within the framework of the narrative. It is ambiguous enough to suggest a sequel, but even if it never gets one, it’s fun to use your imagination to think about what will happen.  Time to Hunt is not an action extravaganza, but it is a solid and good-looking (if overlong) thriller that deserves a view.

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.

 

 

Braddock: Mission in Action III (1988)

Braddock: Missing in Action III (1988)

 

Starring: Chuck Norris, Aki Aleong, Roland Harrah III, Miki Kim, Yehuda Efroni, Ron Barker, Floyd Levine, Jack Rader
Director: Aaron Norris
Action Director: Rick Prieto, Gil Arceo, Renato Morado

 

Having finished up the arc of James Braddock within the span of two movies, there is the question of what to do with him in order to keep making money. After all, there was still some money to be made from the one-man army approach to action filmmaking. Rambo and Platoon rip offs were still a thing as Hollywood entered the final years of the Reagan administration. And then there was Predator, which proved that Arnold Schwarzenegger could do the make bathe the film reels in pure testosterone and still put butts in seats.

Making a third Missing in Action film was not originally on the books. It came about after Chuck and Aaron Norris had a read an article about the plight of Amerasian children in Vietnam. The idea of American serviceman fathering children with the local Asian women has been around since the Spanish-American War, when the Philippines became one of the first American “colonies.” It has happened in Japan, South Korean, and Taiwan. During the Vietnam War, American soldiers sewed their wild oats all over Southeast Asian, especially Vietnam and Thailand. Although the official numbers were once declared to be about 1000, the numbers fell between 20,000 and 30,000 children between American soldiers and Vietnamese women.

The problem with fathering children with the locals—and not marrying the mothers and bringing them home—is that if your side loses the war, those children are not going to be well-liked by the new leadership. The government will probably see the mother as a sort of “race traitor” and the scion as an aberration of sorts. That sort of discrimination is even more likely if the father happens to be black: let’s be honest, a lot of East and Southeast Asian cultures have traditionally placed greater value on paler skin. This sort of gets some lip service in one scene in this film.

There is one little detail about the story that I should mention before I discuss the story: Missing in Action 3 is a complete retcon of the Braddock story arc. Instead of getting captured by enemy forces in 1972, Braddock (still Chuck Norris) is still around come 1975 when Saigon is falling to the insurgents. Instead of an American wife, he is now married to a Vietnamese woman, Lin (Miki Kim), who works as a translator at the American embassy. As the final American helicopters are departing from Saigon, a series of tragedies prevent Braddock from getting his wife out of the country.

First, Lin’s best friend (Pita Liboro) steals her bracelet while the other is packing. Ly gets out of the apartment before her friend does. A couple of minutes later, a mortar destroys the building, with the friend’s body getting completely carbonized in ensuing fire. Braddock arrives in time to see the body getting removed from the rubble. Upon seeing the bracelet, he assumes that it’s his wife. Meanwhile, Lin is making her way to the American embassy, only to trip and fall and get her purse stolen…the purse with her passport inside. With no way to prove her identity, Lin is unable to enter the embassy before chaos erupts and forces the soldiers to withdraw, leaving hundreds of Vietnamese—including Lin--stranded in the country.

Fast forward 12 years. Braddock is hanging out at a bar in Washington D.C. when he receives a visit from a certain Father Polanski (Yehuda Efroni, of Deadly Outbreak and Delta Force). Polanski runs a mission in Vietnam that houses orphaned Amerasian children. He has recently come into contact with a young boy named Van, whose mother is named Lin…Lin Braddock. Braddock initially dismisses the possibility of his wife being alive, but then changes his mind once the CIA, led by Agent Littlejohn (Jack Rader, of Outbreak and The Blob ’88), shows up to tell him that Father Polanski’s is a load of hogwash. I find it interesting that even in 1988, one’s first inclination of hearing something from the CIA was to assume that the opposite is true. So, Braddock takes the first plane to Bangkok, with arrangements to take a civilian plane into Vietnam. The CIA tries to stop him, but this is Chuck Norris we’re talking about. He beats the hell out of the agents following him and makes his way back into ‘Nam.

It doesn’t take Braddock long to find Father Polanski’s mission. Polanski leads him to the shack where Lin and her son, Van (Roland Harrah III, who tragically died at the age of 21), are living. After a tearful reunion, Braddock tells Lin and Van that they need to get out of dodge as quick as possible. While waiting for Braddock to get his speak stealth boat ready, the Vietnamese army shows up to stop them. Their leader, the sadistic General Quoc (Aki Aleong, of The Quest and Sci-Fighter), murders Lin on the spot and takes Braddock and Van into custody. Of course, “custody” means “torture” and this one is a doozy: Braddock has his hands tied up, which are also tied a cord that is rigged to a shotgun aimed at Van (who is strapped to a chair). As long as Braddock stays on the balls of his feet, his son will be fine. But if he relaxes his feet, it will pull the cord and KA-BLAM! Oh, and Genral Quoc also electrocutes Braddock with jumper cables just to make things interesting.

Braddock eventually escapes because…well…this is Chuck Norris we’re talking about. His son goes to the mission to hide, but is found out by General Quoc and his men. Quoc then rounds up all the Amerasian kids and imprisons them. Braddock now has a new mission: save his son and get all the children out of Vietnam to safety. This time, we win!

Braddock: Missing in Action 3 is considered by Norris himself to be the best in the trilogy. I’m inclined to agree. The film is a lot more polished than the first two and Aaron Norris gives the film a more professional look than the earlier movies. He does a better job of convincing us that the Philippines are Vietnam than the earlier movies. Although Canon was swiftly approaching bankruptcy by the time it came out, had more money to spend when production began in 1986—the same year they made Invaders from Mars and Lifeforce. The failure of that last film helped put them on the road to financial ruin. The early scenes in Saigon have an appropriate sense of scale and probably cost more to stage than the other two films combined. It also benefits from better pacing, more martial arts, and a final act that has more emotional investment, considering that children’s lives are now at stake.

With a higher budget, there is more and better action than the previous two installments in the series. The last half hour or so is one long series of set pieces, starting with Braddock’s raid on a prison camp. In one exploitive scene, a soldier tries to rape a teenage girl. Braddock shows up, kicks him around a little, and then rams a grenade launcher into his gut. Firing the weapon, the force of the grenade carries the guy through the wall and leaves a bloody hole in his stomach, after which it explodes. That is followed by an extended truck-helicopter chase through a forest of palm trees. It all leads to a final showdown at the Vietnam-Thai border, which goes into Rambo territory when General Quoc shows up in a Russian Mil Mi-24 attack chopper.

The (relatively) plentiful fight sequences were staged by Rick Prieto, a member of Chuck Norris’s stunt team. He also did fight choreography for The Hero and the Terror and the second Delta Force movie. Although there are no stand-out classics, every time Chuck has to take down some Vietnamese soldiers in close-quarters combat, he performs his usual kicks with great aplomb. He also does some nice leg locks and scissor takedowns in a couple of his fights. With more fighting than the other two movies, plus better explosions, the film was much more satisfying on the action front. This is sort of mindless one-man-army madness that The Expendables wad made to pay tribute to.