Typhoon

last updated 8 January 2015

Think of a John Woo movie without the benefit of a good script or a sense of humor, and you've got Typhoon, said Luke Y. Thompson in SF Weekly. It's 'œa cheap-looking action movie that sabotages itself at nearly every turn,' mostly because of the insanely silly plot that needs plenty of confusing flashbacks in order to explain itself. The main story follows the aptly named Sin, a psychologically twisted terrorist from North Korea who got that way when the government slaughtered his parents and turned his sweet baby sister into a prostitute/drug addict with a brain tumor. Now, he's turned modern-day pirate, and his plan to destroy both Koreas involves nuclear waste from Chernobyl, a stolen missile system, balloons, and the titular typhoon. Enter our hero, Kang, an elite South Korean agent with a crisp white outfit, said G. Allen Johnson in the San Francisco Chronicle. 'œI think we are supposed to think of hero and villain as two sides of the same coin,' but the edits are so disorganized it's hard to tell what director Kwak intends. There's one thing we can be sure of, said Stephen Hunter in The Washington Post. 'œIt doesn't take a genius to see in the two Korean protagonists the two Koreas'—one maniac and one Western assimilator. Perhaps we should give this film the benefit of the doubt, because this kind of drama must mean a whole lot more to Koreans than to Americans.

Rating: R