Smooth, slick and unabashedly patriotic, Korean spy thriller The Age Of Shadows has cooked up a winning formula. It's the 1920s, the oppressive Japanese army rules over Korea while a band of stylishly dressed resistance fighters lurk in the shadows, rattling the colonial sabre. The Japanese -- a villain du jour given that this week at the cinemas we also see Jackie Chan fighting them in World War II-set Railroad Tigers -- are punishing and manipulative, meanwhile the Koreans are clever and heroic (and fashionable). There will be a final explosion so huge the cinema shakes, and you know who'll get blown to bits.
The partisan narrative is forgivable; Korean pop culture is the soft power counterpunching the bane of history. South Korea submitted The Age Of Shadows to the Oscars' best foreign language category (it didn't make the shortlist though), a mark of national pride not only in how the resistance stands up to the imperial army but also in the way director Kim Jee-woon crafts a stylish cat-and-mouse espionage noir in the Hollywood mould. In fact, it's fitting that the film opens here in the same week as Allied, another movie about well-dressed spies wedged in patriotic and personal ordeals.
Among the cast, you'll recognise Gong Yoo, the heartthrob recently seen as the zombie-battling dad in Train To Busan. Here he plays Kim Woo-Jin, a suave strategist of the rebels posing as an antique dealer who's plotting to smuggle explosives into Korea. Watched by the Japanese, Kim tries to persuade Korean police chief Lee Jung-Chool (Song Kang-Ho, another familiar face), who's siding with the occupier and branded a traitor by the resistance, to come over to his side. Lee's ambiguous allegiance -- is he with the Japanese or with the Koreans? -- is the central suspense that drives the film from start to finish.
Director Kim Jee-woon is sometimes called a "cult director" -- just because his last film I Saw The Devil was a salacious orgy of violence and because he's not well-known in the US (in Korea he is). But Kim also directed The Good, The Bad, The Weird, the 2008 flamboyant re-imagination of the Sergio Leone Western classic, and The Age Of Shadows is likewise a big-budget period showcase strung together by efficiently staged set pieces. Kim obviously relishes every chance to choreograph actors, extras, movement, cameras, co-ordinating them into a big swoop not with Kubrick's elegance but perhaps with Michael Mann bravado. We have a big opening scene here of the Japanese troops pursuing a lone rebel, with the camera and people running and gliding.
Then in the middle is a long hide-and-seek suspense on a moving train involving nearly a dozen characters, and the sequence is crafted with attentive rhythm and ends with a Tarantino-like barroom shoot out.
For nationalistic convenience, every Japanese stereotype in this Korean film is deployed with glee. That The Age Of Shadows is a work of fiction designed for maximum entertainment is obvious, though the episode is in fact based (loosely) on the 1923 bombing of Japanese police headquarters in Seoul. In all, Kim Jee-woon may be a filmmaker not best-known for emotional subtlety, but with the right material he knows how to deliver the goods.
The Age Of Shadows
Starring Gong Yoo, Song Kang-Ho, Lee Byung-Hun.
Directed by Kim Jee-Woon.
In Korean with Thai and English subtitles.
