THE YELLOW SEA (Korea, 2010)
Directed by: Na Hong-Jin
Starring: Ha Jung-Woo, Kim Yun-Seok, Jo Sung-Ha

Na Hong-Jin and actors Ha Jung-Woo and Kim Yun-Seok set Korean cinema on fire with The Chaser (also screening at this year’s festival). Their low budget movie about a pimp looking for a serial killer became a massive word-of-mouth hit and shot 50,000 watts of high voltage current through the Korean film industry. Now, with a bigger budget from 20th Century Fox, director Ha and his two actors reunite to unleash this sprawling hitman epic written in bruised knuckles and broken teeth that was a selection of Un Certain Regard at this year’s Cannes Film Festival.

The good guy and bad guy from The Chaser have switched roles and this time Ha Jung-Woo plays Ku-Nam, a cabbie with a gambling addiction living in the Yanbian Autonomous Prefecture in China, a squalid, expatriate Korean ghetto whose nearest neighbor is North Korea. Crushed underneath a mountain of debt and tormented by the thought that his wife, who immigrated to South Korea, is cheating on him, Ku-Nam is looking for a way out and local crime boss, Myung-Ga (roly poly Kim Yun-Seok who played the heroic pimp in The Chaser) offers him one. If he goes to Seoul and kills a guy he’ll get paid US$10,000. Desperate for cash, desperate to find his wife and desperate for some kind of a life, Ku-Nam agrees. Once he arrives in Seoul he rapidly discovers that he’s not the hitman in this scenario, he’s the fall guy. With no qualifications other than a ferocious desire not to be anyone’s patsy, Ku-Nam goes on the run and before long the Chinese mafia, the Korean mafia and the police are after him.

Number one at the box office the week it opened, and shot over 170 days, about twice the shooting length of most Korean movies, THE YELLOW SEA is an epic trawl through the human gutter that features some of the biggest car stunts ever filmed in Seoul. But what you’re going to remember forever are Ku-Nam’s hunted, haunted eyes and that lethal teddy bear, Myung-Ga, taking out assassins in his boxers and bathrobe, a hatchet in one hand and a cigarette in the other. YELLOW SEA is tense, it’s taut, and it’s tight but it’s also totally and completely cool.