2010 ‘황해’ Directed by Na Hong-jin
A Korean man in China takes an assassination job in South Korea to make money and find his missing wife. But when the job is botched, he is forced to go on the run from the police and the gangsters who paid him.
Ha Jung-woo Kim Yoon-seok Cho Seong-ha Lee Cheol-min Kwak Do-won Im Ye-won Tak Sung-Eun Lee El Jeong Man-sik Jung Min-sung Park Yun-ho Seung Eui-yeol Kim Ki-hwan Seong Byeong-sook Yum Dong-hun Gong Jeong-hwan Kim Heung-soo Baek Seung-chul Yoon Byung-hee Kang Hyun-joong Jo Jae-yun Son Kang-gook Lee Hee-jun Baek Won-gil Hwang Suk-jung Jung Dae-Yong Lim Hyung-taek Yoo Ha-bok Baek Hyun-joo Show All…
Hwanghae, Желтое море, Mar amarillo, The Murderer
Crime, drugs and gangsters High speed and special ops Thrillers and murder mysteries martial arts, kung fu, choreography, cool or action-packed violence, action, guns, cops or killing gangster, crime, criminal, violence or ruthless cops, murder, thriller, detective or crime action, explosives, exciting, action-packed or villain Show All…
From the director that brought us the The Chaser comes another thrill ride where the line of morality gets blurred and us as audience members get to know and see more of the underground world in South Korea through the glance of a broke and desperate Chinese taxi driver that accepts a deal to kill an important man in order to pay his debt and getting to meet his wife whose working somewhere on South Korea. Things will not go precisely well and a cat-and-mouse chase begins.
When it comes to the violence, this movie hits all the right and often high notes. Its bloody, at times gory, and with its editing and hand-held camera work adds to the frantic…
Welcome to bleak shit the crime thriller, the absurdist pitch black dark comedy and the depressing as fuck drama.
Gu-nam (played superbly by Ha Jung-woo) is a cab driver who lives in the region where the borders of North Korea, China and Russia come together. It's a tough area where most people turn to crimes for a living.
Gu-nam's wife went to South Korea for work and he drowns his sorrow, frustration and mistrust about his wife in alcohol and mahjong, resulting in a huge debt to some criminals.
The local crime boss Myun (played by Kim Yun-seok) makes Gu-nam an offer he cannot refuse. He sends Gu-na to Seoul for a contract killing in exchange for wiping his debt.…
I love that it opens with a heartbreaking story of a dog with rabies that ran away only to come back skinny and dead behind the eyes before it's body finally gave out only to then depict groups of human beings as larger and larger swarms of screaming hatchet wielding maniacs. You can't close a goddamn door in this movie without disembodied arms reaching around the door to blindly and impotently stab at you with a muddy butcher's knife. Trying to get into a truck? Good lucky, buddy. One hundred men with tiny axes are running towards you at full speed with their knees up around their chests. The rabies is back.
Ethnic Koreans living in China - Joseonjok - turn to South Korea for better prospects. When a degenerate gambler (Ha Jung-woo) struggles to pay off his missing wife's travel expenses, a local gangster (Kim Yoon-seok) hires him to head south for a contract kill (Kwak Do-won). Smuggled into South Korea, Jung-woo has a few days to track down his missing wife and carry out the hit.
Of Na Hong-jin's three features, Yellow Sea has a lot more in common with The Chaser than The Wailing. The leads moral compasses remain completely broken, but the high octane cat-and-mouse chase is at the forefront of the plot. The stakes aren't as high, nor the interpersonal relationships as daring - but that actually…
Guns are not the weapon of choice in this film, knives, axes, and a huge badass hunk of bone are incorporated nicely into the film! Unlike a gun you need to get up close and personal when you use these weapons! There is something primal about it, a guttural throwback to a time when man fought man face to face!
No rest for the wicked in this fast paced film with its intense chases! Extremely bloody and violent! A villain so ruthless, so relentlessly brutal it sends chills up and down your spine!
After making his mark with a sensational debut feature that easily ranks amongst the finest thrillers of the decade, director Na Hong-jin follows it up with something that isn't as amazing as his previous work but is nicely crafted nonetheless. The Yellow Sea tells the story of a cab driver who hasn't heard from his wife for 6 months after she left for Korea to earn some money. With financial debt escalating, this man tries his hand at gambling to earn extra cash but ends up losing at that too & when faced with a dead end, decides to do a bidding for a local hit-man that goes horribly wrong, thus creating some terrible situation for him.
Honestly, the first half…
Director Na Hong-jin's second movie The Yellow Sea is in line with the style of his first work and could excite the masses oNa Hong-jin has a more raw approach to filmmaking. He doesn’t rely on style or novelty to reinforce his craft, yet he still delivers an edgy intensity that very few filmmakers are able to capture.
Na Hong-jin maintained most of the elements that made an impression in his debut, by incorporating great characters, desperation and agony, and impressive fighting scenes. The latter benefit the most from the impressive cinematography of Lee Sung-je, which also presents artfully the surroundings in both China and Korea, and the fast editing by Kim Sun-min, which allows the film the retain a…
The Yellow Sea starts off slow before exploding into a maelstrom of violence. Na Hong-jin's follow up to his critically acclaimed The Chaser is much more expansive than the earlier film. Not necessarily better, but just as intense. The plot focuses around an area between the borders of North Korea, China and Russia and focuses on a man who takes a Job as an assassin in order to pay off a debt that he owes to a local gangster. The first third is all set up and the director does a good job of getting us involved in the plot and characters, before literally pulling the rug and letting the violence run loose. It's all very hard hitting and bloody…
The Yellow Sea for me, was way too fragmented and lacked any sense of flow. It was a like a really nice looking car with a shitty engine. Whenever it started getting going; it broke down again and we're left on the side of the road.
And then whilst we're broke down in our nice looking car, some random crazy looking bastard runs up to us and starts stabbing us repeatedly only to then run off. And suddenly the car starts again, and we start chasing that crazy bastard (and everything). Rinse and repeat.
The film is essentially a series of chase scenes, an excessive amount of same-old stabbing moments, stupid inept police (they always seem to be inept in…
Boy, was this a snorefest to watch. I never expected it to be as fabulously thrilling as the director's debute, The Chaser, but going into this I was still hoping for significantly more than the confusing mess that I got in the end. I'm not sure what exactly Na Hong-jin was trying to accomplish with this film but it feels like he couldn't decide if he wanted to make a silly but mindlessly fun action flick or a stylish noir family drama and so, in the end, he just went with a strange mixture of both in hopes that it would somehow succeed anyway.
The movie tries hard to appeal to the viewers' emotions by giving the borderline hobo Djingis…
Okay, I'm keeping a very close Eye on Na Hong-Jin!
After his incredible dense The Wailing and this one right here, I'm pretty certain that there aren't many Directors who could show him anything in the Thriller Genre!
What a Tour-de-Force through South Korea for Jung-woo Ha!
He hacks, saws, escapes blockades and runs through barriers like a young Demon-God! It's a painful delight to follow him through, mostly in the Streets of Seoul.
Always driven by grief and agony!
Also Holy shit, at Kim Yun-Seok, what a freaky funny Slasher-Guy (as long as i don't have to work with him! ;-).
This Gangster Boss doesn't fuck around! Pay him and do your Job and for Buddha's sake, never double cross him. Seriously Crazy!
Very 'Oldboy'ian, the raw Impact of the fighting scenes.
