| "Soo" opens with a view of the crowd at what looks like a hugely important sporting event. Though there are no obvious details, it looks like it might be the 2002 South Korea World Cup match. One large area of the crowd is holding up an enormous South Korean flag; and the crowd, as you would expect, is shouting, yelling, growling and groaning with one joyfully aggressive voice. The scene then shifts to the lone Soo in his car, thinking about his once-lost twin brother, on the way to his assignment to steal documents from a corrupt businessman – by any means necessary. What does this juxtaposition of the athletic event crowd scene with the scene of the lone assassin-for-hire mean? I’m not sure. One possibility that I like is that all the shouting and growling and yelling and moaning are okay at the sporting event, especially a national one. It means that you’re part of a legitimate social order, a kind of “normal” insider exercising your right to roar. This sets up a meaningful contrast with the film’s characters. Their growlings and gruntings and moanings and yellings and roarings – and there’s more of that than actual articulated dialogue – are those of “abnormal” outsiders, threats to the legitimate social order, purposely lethal people. It would be difficult to imagine any one of the film’s sociopaths at anything as “healthy” as a soccer match; the main guy, Soo, included. There are deep human urges, the contrast seems to say; and some people can channel them into desirable social behavior, while others can’t.
Soo’s past is not made very clear. There are none of the parent-child flashbacks that we’re used to in Korean dramas. How Soo got separated from and lost contact with his twin brother is a bit murky. The exact relationship between the twins and their respective “outsider” father figures is never spelled out. And so on. What we do have, from a cinematic point of view, is a very interesting character. As an apparently orphaned kid, he developed his view that with money, you could solve any problem, making him willing to risk and undergo any amount of physical violence to get it. Watching him rob the drug dealer in that early scene, you get the impression that you’re not dealing with a brilliant criminal mind, but rather with somebody who is so determined and focused that the physical beating he gets doesn’t really matter. That’s probably what made him such a good fighter. In that early scene in the garage where he frightens the businessman into signing and handing over documents, he doesn’t care that he himself is in that car that he’s jerking around and smashing into things to scare the businessman. The final battle scene is remarkable. He goes and goes against about a dozen knife and sword-wielding, kicking and punching gangsters. But he’s also the kind of person who, as a kid, would jam an afro wig on his head, join up with three veteran lady club singers about twice his age, and jump around the stage in front of a bunch of drunks, singing the song, “Money!”
This is not a kind of cold-blooded assassin/leading man that I’m used to. Ji Jin Hee portrays him beautifully. There’s no clear intelligence in his eyes; not much emotion; no sense of ambition; no flow of ego. No snappy quips to the bad guys; no kick-ass talk to one and all; no tender looks for the ladies; no fancy kicks, cool punches, or smoothly-executed slices to wherever. He just gets into that adrenalin zone and goes. What’s his motivation? Redemption. How does he get it? Revenge. This is pure stuff, and I’d love to see him in action again.
Other aspects of the film are very good also. The use of music was especially good – spare and understated for the most part; and slightly mournful in general; not the bang-bang-bang of the typical action film. It was beautifully directed and acted, with every gesture and image having significance. The suspense is good, and gets resolved with believable actions. The use of locations, as usual in K-Flix is great. The dark corridors, dead-end alleys, and the criss-crossing narrow streets make for great action scenes that you love to enter and follow in your imagination – the underside of Seoul, the paths of the outsiders. |
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