"The Yellow Sea" stands out joltingly, even among the already-rich South Korean filmography, most due to the acting by Yun-seok Kim, playing the villain from China. If there ever was "Bad-Ass," he is it. While he start out the movie seeming to be some sort of small-time, local con- artist, as the movie progresses, he shows his chilling, true colors as a soulless, remorseless, goal-oriented psychopath who refuses to lose a fight.
The scenes with Yun-seok Kim are truly some of the most electrifying, disturbing, and soul-killing scenes present in cinema. The Korean gangster counterparts provide almost a "commic" relief in their relative inadequacies, as well as the SK police which is depicted as impotent, as usually done in SK cinema.
Ha plays the main character pretty well, given the script, but it is difficult to believe that a taxi driver from China could engineer to many clever stunts and escapes, given how little time and resource he had. Ha does succeed in capturing the empathy of the audience with his plight.
This movie would have reached a higher level if some of the bloodshed and knifing were edited out to increase the shock value of the truly fierce scenes. Some of the car-chase and crash scenes should have been edited out as well to improve the coherence of the main theme and characters without so much Hollywood-esque action and noise to get in the way and dilute the mood.
But overall the movie still shines bright as a dark, stark, chilling shocker that could not exist anywhere else in the cinema world.
The scenes with Yun-seok Kim are truly some of the most electrifying, disturbing, and soul-killing scenes present in cinema. The Korean gangster counterparts provide almost a "commic" relief in their relative inadequacies, as well as the SK police which is depicted as impotent, as usually done in SK cinema.
Ha plays the main character pretty well, given the script, but it is difficult to believe that a taxi driver from China could engineer to many clever stunts and escapes, given how little time and resource he had. Ha does succeed in capturing the empathy of the audience with his plight.
This movie would have reached a higher level if some of the bloodshed and knifing were edited out to increase the shock value of the truly fierce scenes. Some of the car-chase and crash scenes should have been edited out as well to improve the coherence of the main theme and characters without so much Hollywood-esque action and noise to get in the way and dilute the mood.
But overall the movie still shines bright as a dark, stark, chilling shocker that could not exist anywhere else in the cinema world.