A Korean Film from 1999. Broke all box office records for the time, and is said to have opened the Korean cinema floodgates. Well’¦ after watching it’¦It IS the best Korean film I have seen so far since I started this pilgrimage into Korean Cinema last year with ‘˜Sympathy for Mr. Vengeance’™. It could have gotten a 4.5 rating if someone would have spent the time on the chase sequences that this great film disserved. The story revolves around a Special ops group in the diminishing North Korean army and it’s plan to disrupt a ‘˜leap of faith’™ soccer game setup to help reconcile the two countries. We follow two Special agents of the South Korean Government as they track down the lead sniper of the SpecOps team and its other members. What hooks you in is the training of the SpecOp sniper years before (during the opening credits) and the use of live targets (captured South Korean army soldiers) in her training. Extremely violent scenes throughout the film, but just enough to move the story. Now to the present where the sniper is back in Seoul after a 2 year hiatus, and the two men chasing her uncover much more than expected. The story is every Tom Clancy book mixed with a little Alias and a touch of Black Sunday’¦did I mention a lot of the style of James Bond. Everything worked well, the acting, the scale, the emotions’¦all fit perfectly and were not forced. It is almost like they hired a western film crew who could speak Korean. The narrative followed the guidelines we are used to here in the states, and to me that’s what makes it a step above the rest. More bullets are fired and fish killed than any other movie I have every seen. My only beef…besides the shakercam technique used during some of the chases is fact the good guys couldn’t hit water if they fell out of a f**kin boat. Of the 5000 plus rounds that are shot in the movie’¦the bad guys get hit with maybe 10 of those. Meanwhile the good guys drop like flies. Very good espionage flick and worthy of a top notch English dubbing, reading the subtitles just takes your eyes of the perfectly shot scenes.
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