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《纽约时报》影评
Heroes and Villains Battle for the Future of Korea in 'Typhoon'
By LAURA KERN
Published: June 2, 2006
"Typhoon" has the largest budget of a Korean movie to date, and it shows. Grandiose and bursting with macho energy, Kwak Kyung-taek's fierce yet formulaic action film, shot in Korea, Russia and Thailand, features elaborate set pieces aboard ships and on land, persistent machine-gun fire and a booming score that conveys villainy or heroism, depending on what the scene calls for.
The film pits Sin (Jang Dong-gun), a snarling exile from North Korea who is enraged at the world, against the South Korean Kang Se-jong (Lee Jung-jae), a strait-laced navy lieutenant assigned to foil Sin's plot to unleash lethal chemicals on both North and South Korea via balloons during a typhoon.
But despite his devilish — and undeniably outlandish — intentions, Sin bares his vulnerable side when reuniting with his long-lost sister, who is coerced into acting as bait to aid in her brother's capture. He thereby secures Kang's sympathy, and audiences, too, will be rooting for Sin, since much screen time is devoted to flashbacks that trace his tragic childhood, while very little is allotted to his wooden rival.
"Typhoon" aims high but misses the emotional mark in most instances, resulting in some awkward melodramatics. Even so, it flourishes during its well-executed action sequences and commands attention almost instantaneously, though, in the end, it will be forgotten just as quickly.
"Typhoon" is rated R (Under 17 requires accompanying parent or adult guardian) for extreme violence and some harsh language.
Opens today in New York, Los Angeles, San Francisco, San Diego, Honolulu, Seattle, Washington and Chicago
Written (in Korean, with English subtitles) and directed by Kwak Kyung-taek; director of photography, Hong Kyeng-pyo; edited by Park Simon Kwang-il; production designer, Jeon In-han; produced by Park Seong-keon and Yang Joong-kyueng; released by Paramount Classics and CJ Entertainment. In Manhattan at the AMC Empire 25, 42nd Street, at Eighth Avenue. Running time: 103 minutes.
WITH: Jang Dong-gun (Choi Myong Sin), Lee Mi-yeon (Choi Myeong Ju) and Lee Jung-jae (Kang Se-jong).
华盛顿邮报上《台风》的影评一篇
Editorial Review
In Thriller 'Typhoon', a terroris on the High Seas
By Stephen Hunter
Washington Post Staff Writer
Friday, June 2, 2006; Page C05
The Korean thriller "Typhoon" is solid in a way few pop culture entertainments are these days. Even so, it trails melancholy vapors, ideas of loss and pain and a sense of bitter insignificance that may be peculiarly Korean but are vivid enough when the film is on the screen to transcend into something universal.
Basically, the story follows as an intrepid naval officer, on loan to the KCIA, tracks down a terrorist with a crazed need to destroy South Korea with Russian nuclear waste. But so much time is spent on the terrorist and his story, and he's so much a product of that sundered peninsular culture, with its wall of wire, sandbags and machine-gun nests running right through the middle, that you can't help but see beyond the simplicities of us and them. Suppose, it asks, it turns out that they are us?
Sin, as the terrorist is called, has a good reason to hate the South Koreans. He is by birth North Korean; 20 years earlier, when he was a child, his family plotted to reach the Austrian Embassy in Beijing, apply for amnesty and somehow get into South Korea. However, while the Austrians were willing to be used as a conduit, political expediencies led Seoul to refuse entry; the defectors, instead of making it to the promised land of Hyundais and Chan-wook Park movies, got massacred for their troubles. Only two survived: the young man who grew to be the terrorist and his sister, who haunts "Typhoon" as a tragic, dying specter (she's played by Lee Mi Yeon).
Sin, far and away the most interesting character in the film, is played by Jang Dong Kun, who will be familiar to some moviegoers as the heroic servant in the very recent film "The Promise." In both movies he projects a brooding masculine power, a damaged radiance, if you will.He reminds me a little of the character played way back in 1977 by Bruce Dern in "Black Sunday," a monster who should be stopped in his socks by concentrated applications of firepower and yet a man whose pain was inflicted upon him by others who did not care about him. The terror he brings cannot be righteous, but it is understandable and, in a certain weird light, impressive.
He is pursued by a lean-jawed, straight-ahead hero type embodied by rugged Lee Jung Jae, who looks so good in his naval whites he makes you want to go to Annapolis. Lee is as simple and straightforward as Jang is opaque and angry; it's a good match, and you might think of something like Bruce Willis in pursuit of Sean Penn to get the sensibility.
The director is Kwak Kyung Taek, who keeps things flying along, but never quite goes nuts. A few others have compared this to a James Bond movie, but it's more of a piece with a Tom Clancy movie; it never leaves the real world that far behind, it has a fair sense of documentary reality, and the action sequences -- from shootout to car chase to a commando takedown of a tanker on the high seas to a final knife fight -- are extremely well managed. Unlike "Shira," another Korean action film aimed for international success, it doesn't give in to Hong Kong gangster stylistics and become so acrobatic in its action sequences that it feels circusy; the shooting and the dying all take place, more or less (a little movie hooey here and there annoys), in a recognizable natural world governed by physics and science.
The movie begins with an attack on a freighter in the China Seas, by which certain kinds of nuclear upgrade kits headed for Taiwan are stolen by pirates led by Jang's Sin, who trades them off for that Russian nuclear waste. KCIA's Lee is soon on the case and the movie bounces around various scurvy Asian ports (even as you take pleasure in thinking: I'm never going there; it's crummy!) until it climaxes on shipboard in the weather system of the title, as Sin tries to get close enough to the peninsula to do his damage via a highly creative delivery system.
Meanwhile -- here's a tang of small-country bitterness -- the Americans and the Chinese maneuver to "support" their client states even as it's clear they really don't give a darn about them.
But "Typhoon" is never far from allegory, that lesser form of symbolism. It doesn't take a genius to see in the two Korean protagonists the two Koreas: One is an outcast, unruly, angry, certainly doomed, driven to craziness, possibly psychotic but at the same time strangely sympathetic; the other is disciplined, hard-driving, clean-cut, forward-looking, motivated, tied irrevocably to the West.
As these two guys go at it knife-and-fist in the burning hold of a sinking ship, you think: Can't they all just get along? |
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发表于 2005-7-27 22:47
发表于 2005-11-18 16:48
