The Yellow Sea (English Subtitled)

Korean Tale of Murder, Double Crosses, Car Chases, Inept Cops and Mah-Jong!
EDIT: The folowing review is based on the full version and not the hacked to pieces offering that Fox have put out both on DVD and Az Instant Video. It is a 5 star film, but only when viewed in its entirity. Please see the reviews for the DVD that explain further, the full version with English subs is available in Region 2 from Az.UK

This is a truly stupendous film that takes a while to sink in. It is South Korean (with sub titles) but starts its story in Yanju City in the Yanbian Province of China. This is an area next to the borders of North Korea, Russia and China, the local Koreans are referred to as Joseonjoks and Gu Nam (Ha Jung-Woo) is one such man. He has borrowed 60,000 Yuan to send his wife to a better life in Korea, but that was six months ago and he has not heard from her, most suspect that she is a bit of a flibbertigibbet and as such has dumped him and their daughter for the high life of making a living from lying down. He meanwhile has to repay the debt to...

Riveting
Yellow River is about happenings in a region of China where people live on the edge and depend mostly on illegal activities for survival. Gu Nam lives alone and owes a lot of gambling debt, his wife has left for Korea and he has not heard from her. He loses a lot of money one night playing MahJong and is offered to pay his debts by going to Seoul as an assassin.
The movie is divided into four chapters as The Cab Driver, The Killer, Joeseonjok and The Yellow Sea), and at 140 minutes a very long film. However it is relentless and well made, Na Hong Jin directed this film and does a fantastic job portraying Gu Na, as the assassin who is weak at first but develops a will to live and mercilessly slaughter his enemies.The enemies do multiply and multiply and so do the fights. These are some amazing sequences which involve mobs and running. There are no guns employed to kill these people but knives and any other objects that can be picked. Most of the film focuses on Gu Nam and his...

Extremely gritty action flick
This film dices up non-stop shooting, stabbing, clubbing, chopping and lots of other acts of violence in a very inhospitable backdrop of wintertime somewhere in Korea to somewhere in China. There are so many fight scenes that the director has to cut fight scenes short to get on to the next fight scene. What I mean by this is that a guy walks into a room with a knife and the next scene almost everyone in the room is dead. Also - if this movie is representative of the actual invincibility of Asians, then nobody should go to war with an Asian country under any circumstances because everyone there needs to be shot about 20 times and/or stabbed ~50 before they die. I personally like martial arts films a bit more (ie Jackie Chan & Sammo Hung) but this flick definitely satisfies as a gory romp through the underbelly of somewhere in Asia.

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