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Reviewed by Elliot V. Kotek
(June 2011, from the 2011 Los Angeles Film Festival)

Directed/Written by: Na Hong-jin
Starring: Ha Jung-woo, Kim Yun-seok and Cho Seong-ha

“The Yellow Sea” is a seriously exciting film, a pulse-checking visceral experience that will have you questioning when, if ever, you saw car chases and butchering skills quite this inventive.

The title of the film doesn’t do the picture justice; despite its relevance — signifying the divide between China and Korea that must be crossed by many in hope of a Western-world future — the words themselves are suggestive of a quiet epic.

“The Yellow Sea” takes you by the hand into the life of Ha Jung-woo’s Gu-nam cab-driving character, a man who has lost his wife to the West, carelessly gambles away any chance of a decent existence and has delivered his future (in the form of his daughter) to a family member with whom he has little contact. His is a lonely world occupied by inner demons and a creative dream-state, and the helmer skillfully ushers you into his predicament, a strategy that serves him well when the plot ignites.

Gu-nam is offered freedom from his debts, a chance to start over, in exchange for passage to Korea where he is to assassinate an underworld figure and return with the victim’s finger. The incentive is two-fold: a new start and a chance to look for a wife he assumes has left him behind.

When another group of hit men become involved, a series of events unfolds that transforms the hunter into the hunted, and that’s where we’ll leave you to experience the significant plot twists for yourself. Save to say that the adrenaline rush is expertly balanced with enough moments of hope and sanity to enable the director to then plunge you back from whence you came.

If Ha’s Gu-nam is an unlikely hero, the smorgasbord of villains, too, is intriguing, with personalities worthy of their status and different enough from each other as to ensure the audience is kept on their toes. Kim Yun-seok as Myun is a fierce revelation.

The enemy of my enemy might be a friend for the sake of proverb, but in writer-director Na Hong-jin’s world of human trafficking and people-smuggling, no one can really ever be trusted. The exciting thing about “The Yellow Sea” is that for all its heart-stopping adrenaline, the director has ensured we have someone for whom we care, someone for whom, for a shade over two hours, we want to see survive. That in his second film a Korean director not only succeeds in delivering this multitude of layers within a big-budget action thriller but also gets Fox International to invest is evidence of the belief in his talents.

With a score that reverberates through your skin, “The Yellow Sea” inspired this reviewer to relive the rush experienced when he first saw Alejandro González Iñárritu’s “Amores Perros” and, somehow, Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth.” In the follow-up to his promising debut feature “The Chaser,” Na has graduated from promising to powerful.