Age of Shadows, The (2016)
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Review #1,392 |
THE SCOOP
Director: Kim Jee-woon
Cast: Song Kang-ho, Gong Yoo, Lee Byung-hun, Han Ji-min
Plot: Set in the late 1920s, the film follows the cat-and-mouse game that unfolds between a group of resistance fighters trying to bring in explosives from Shanghai to destroy key Japanese facilities in Seoul, and Japanese agents trying to stop them.
Genre: Drama / Action / Thriller
Awards: -
Runtime: 140min
Rating: NC16 for violence
Distributor: Warner Bros
IN RETROSPECT (Spoilers: NO)
One of the more anticipated South Korean films
to hit our shores from last year, The Age
of Shadows is Kim Jee-woon's feature-length return to his national cinema
since the ultraviolent vengeance thriller I Saw the Devil (2010), and after his English-language debut with
Schwarzenegger in The Last Stand
(2013).
It dives into the exquisite period detail of
the late 1920s, and the intriguing double-crossing world of spies, all set
against the backdrop of Japanese-occupied Seoul that would see resistance
fighters for Korean independence attempt to transport explosives from Shanghai to
blow up key Japanese government facilities.
Song Kang-ho plays Lee Jung-Chool, the man in
the thick of bloody action and suspenseful deceit, who leads us into this
dangerous world. He is at the crossroads
himself—a Korean who holds a high position in the Japanese police force whose
mission is to track and eradicate the Resistance.
The film will no doubt force him to take sides,
but that decision is not the raison d’etre of Kim's work. It forgoes a rich sense of history or
politics for a more gleefully straightforward exercise in genre filmmaking,
with his trademark dash of gory violence (those who have seen the far more
explicit I Saw the Devil would find
this tolerable).
From the outset, Kim shows us the thrills you
can expect in a splendid prologue action set-piece that gives the film enough
energy to wade through some of its more expository segments later on. The characters are for most parts
well-developed, and the acting uniformly excellent. The pacing, however, could have been tighter,
and even though the film is largely entertaining, there’s a sense that it is a
good fifteen minutes too long, and feels overdrawn to work powerfully.
Nevertheless, Kim is at his best when
prolonging the suspense—a brilliantly-devised set-piece in a moving train that sees
the Japanese police trying to weed out resistance fighters in disguise pays
homage to both Hitchcock and Tarantino.
The Age
of Shadows may
be crafted with operatic scale and striving for an epic-ness that its subject
matter necessitates. However, it doesn’t
quite achieve the grand canvas that combines style with a deeper psychological connection
to its time and historicity, in a way that, for example, Melville did in what I
think is his finest film, Army of Shadows
(1969), about French resistance fighters in Nazi-occupied France.
The use of Ravel’s ‘Bolero’ music in the
climactic set-piece of The Age of Shadows
is perhaps the best example of Kim’s flawed indulgence in trying to create
cinematic magic, but falling short. Go
watch it though, because you need your Korean fix, and this should rightly satisfy
you.
Verdict: Crafted with operatic scale and striving for
an epic-ness that its subject matter necessitates, but ultimately feels overdrawn
to work powerfully.
GRADE: B
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