★★☆☆☆ Missions, murders and conspiracies: the basic recipe for almost all of Seung-wan Ryoo's films. His ninth feature, The Berlin File (2013), borrows a similarly seething framework to Dachimawa Lee (2008), all about spies and the threat of North Korea. This is certainly timely given Western paranoia over a nuclear Pyongyang, but Ryoo's new piece is a failed attempt at disentangling the complex web of corruption and browbeating politics cooked up between the military and government. Plotting this film is basically folly, as it clings to the idea that the action sequences will be so mesmerising you won't need to know what's going on.
Pyo (Jung-woo Ha), a North Korean secret agent, is sent undercover to expose an illegal arms deal but is soon caught up in a North-South espionage nightmare, where traitors defect and then re-defect, cameras film other cameras and Pyo is left wondering who has betrayed him: his wife or his political overlords.
Pyo (Jung-woo Ha), a North Korean secret agent, is sent undercover to expose an illegal arms deal but is soon caught up in a North-South espionage nightmare, where traitors defect and then re-defect, cameras film other cameras and Pyo is left wondering who has betrayed him: his wife or his political overlords.
- 6/23/2013
- by CineVue UK
- CineVue
[Thanks to Charles Webb for the following review.]
Director Seung-wan Ryoo’s spy farce Dachimawa Lee is ostensibly set during WWII when the Japanese were the big villains of Asia and occupied nations formed their own resistance to this invading force. But Mr. Ryoo and his screenwriting partner Hyeok-jae Kwon aren’t interested in just sending up espionage films of the genre, but instead creating a heady mashup of eras and tone birthing the wildly broad Dachimawa Lee.
Director Seung-wan Ryoo’s spy farce Dachimawa Lee is ostensibly set during WWII when the Japanese were the big villains of Asia and occupied nations formed their own resistance to this invading force. But Mr. Ryoo and his screenwriting partner Hyeok-jae Kwon aren’t interested in just sending up espionage films of the genre, but instead creating a heady mashup of eras and tone birthing the wildly broad Dachimawa Lee.
- 6/25/2009
- by Todd Brown
- Screen Anarchy
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