After breaking box office records with the definitive Korean action flick, Shiri, Kang Je-gyu sets his sights on another genre, crafting Korea’s definitive war epic in the form of Taegukgi. As a result, his formula remains the same: classic Hollywood genre pics combined with an inherently Korean struggle with politics and nationalism. Viewers well-acquainted with his influences may react apathetically to many familiar scenes, stylistic choices and plot turns, but Kang makes one major improvement upon his last film by giving us two sympathetic, conflicted leads to care about, making the two and a half hour running time simply fly by.
After a brief present-day scene, Taegukgi flashes back to the outbreak of war in 1950. Two brothers, one an out-of-school shoe shiner with modest aspirations of owning his own shop, and the other, an intelligent 18-year-old student, are forcibly drafted into the army and shipped out. Unable to find a way out of the war, Jin-tae, the older brother, decides the best strategy to get his younger brother back home alive is to earn a medal for bravery himself, and use the recognition to his advantage. Meanwhile, Jin-seok, the younger brother is having a lot more trouble adjusting, especially in his worries over Jin-tae’s “selfless” near-suicidal actions.
Taegukgi most often resembles Saving Private Ryan stylistically in its intimate, shaky cinematography that places its audience right in the dirty trenches of remarkably staged battles filled with an unrelenting mix of explosions, machine gunfire and gory bursts of flesh. The well-constructed sets (courtesy of Kang’s insane budget) often take our leads from rural, hill-top fights into tight city battles—Pyongyang is especially memorable in its complex detail.
But Taegukgi’s main (and perhaps only) divergence from the typical war film is its committed focus to two characters. The family back home and a couple supporting army characters earn some screen time, but the film is not giving its viewers a memorable brotherhood of soldiers bound to slowly get whittled down during the film’s tragic battles.
Instead, this film’s brotherhood is literal. Perhaps the metaphor is a bit unwieldy, but the two brothers grow from an innocent and loving relationship into something more conflicted and complicated, concurrent with the civil war splitting their country. Taegukgi is also big on the male bonding motif what with all the valiant actions of Jin-tae and consequently, Jin-seok’s development from a frail and naïve kid to a hardened, aggressive fighter. Jang Dong-kun—who gives an unforgettably ranged performance as Jin-tae— funnily enough even resembles Chow Yun-fat, the reigning king of heroic bloodshed flicks. The film’s third act is by far its most original as Kang truly takes advantage of the brotherhood theme to speak to the uniquely Korean issues.
But in the time leading up to the third act, Kang has to rely on the usual themes and safe bets to keep it moving, and naturally, this leads to many heavy-handed plot contrivances. The most striking one is the persistently convenient dodging of enemy fire. When it is explicitly established early on in the film that anyone can be killed a second later by a stray bullet, it grows increasingly frustrating to watch the script resort to ridiculous moments where characters fearlessly get up and avoid enemy fire without any cover. Early scenes before the war starts are equally artificial in their clunky blissful tones that depict characters enjoying the little things in life like popsicles and splashing each other in the water. One absurd, yet straight-faced moment even feels like something out of a parody movie when a character says “I want everyday to be like this, no more or no less.” We can already form the dramatic montage of happy thoughts that will run through a characters head two hours later in the film. Oh, and a soldier proudly passes around pictures of his loving family that he wishes to return to, but of course never will because by the established rules of Taegukgi’s predecessors, the guy passing around pictures has to die.
So in the end, Taegukgi is essentially what we all could have expected from Kang Je-gyu, for better or worse. It’s a solid film to be sure, though it’s solid for the same reasons a lot of other films are solid and this diminishes any impact of novelty. But it’s an entertaining tearjerker because of its fantastic leads and for those with the time, it is definitely worth sitting through to see the moments where the film finally comes into its own.
Reviewed by Tarun
