Though his Hollywood debut, the Arnold
Schwarzenegger-fronted actioner The Last Stand, didn’t go
quite as well as planned (flawed to be sure, I still dig it more than most),
South Korean director Kim Jee-woon has done little more than churn out one hit
after another for more than a decade. His genre-crossing run started with A
Tale of Two Sisters and rolled right through masterpieces like
A Bittersweet Life, The Good, the Bad, the
Weird, and I Saw the Devil.
Back working in his home country (though teaming up with
Warner Bros.) after his brief dalliance with America, Kim’s latest,
The Age of Shadows—which just so happens to be South Korea’s
submission for the best foreign language Academy Award this year—finds the filmmaker
hopping genres again. A lush, lavish, impeccably staged period piece set during
the Japanese occupation of Korea in the early 20th century, Shadows
delivers twisted, layered, pulpy spy thriller deliciousness.
The great Song Kang-ho (Snowpiercer,
Thirst, The Host) stars as Lee Jung-chool,
a Korean-born police officer and former member of the resistance now in cahoots
with the Japanese occupiers. Working to unravel a rebel plot, lead by Kim Woo-jin
(Train to Busan star Gong Yoo), to smuggle explosives into Seoul,
turns into a razor wire cat-and-mouse game of shifting loyalties, betrayal, unlikely
comradery, ethical grey zones, and crises of conscience.
Everyone plays their own angle and has their own end game in
sight. While the “in another life, they could be friends” thread isn’t wholly
fresh, an earnestness drives the two central figures despite the fact that
neither ever explicitly speaks his mind. A moment between Song Kang-ho, Gong
Yoo, and Lee Byung-hun only highlights this sharp, stirring, back and forth
full of hidden meanings and subtext. Little more than three men sitting at a
table pounding booze, watching this vaunted trio together comprises one of the
many true joys of The Age of Shadows.
Driven by a borderline discordant score; off-the-wall, yet
somehow perfect soundtrack choices; and effortlessly gorgeous camera work from
frequent Kim collaborator Kim Ji-yong, The Age of Shadows
crackles with energy. An extended scene on a train gives Hitchcock a run for
his money when it come to building suspense, and the narrative veers from
thriller to interpersonal drama to near horror. Let it be remembered, Kim Jee-woon
is never one to shy away from brutal violence when the need arises, illustrated
by a handful of grim, stomach-churning torture scenes and the predilections of
Um Tae-goo’s Hashimoto, an ambitious, wild card Japanese cop.
For a time in the final act, things unravel and spiral out
of control as Kim loses focus and momentum—the scope gets a bit grand for
itself, it's easy to lose threads if you're not paying attention, and the pace drags when it needs to pick up most. But he’s so assured as
a filmmaker and has such a precise, meticulous hand—coupled with a compelling, at
times mesmerizing performance from Song—that he regains control. Think of it as
the cinematic equivalent of grabbing the steering wheel just before the car
careens off a cliff.
An homage to older films—it watches like a Korean version of
a paranoid Cold War spy thriller—Kim breathes his own particular life into the
narrative. Part arthouse, part grindhouse; pulsing with pressure and stakes
both personally and politically astronomical; and exquisite in every last
detail, The Age of Shadows could have been lifted from the
pages of a dime-store paperback with breathless tension, moral ambiguity, and
complex action. [Grade: A-]
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