Also screening as part of the Korean Film Festival, director Kwak Kyung-taek’s Typhoon is a very Korean interpretation of the sort of Hollywood blockbuster that Hollywood was making ten years ago, before they started reproducing Korean horror films en mass. Revenge, perhaps?

Typhoon follows an intrepid naval intelligence officer hunting a terrorist-pirate with a crazed need to destroy the Korean Peninsula using Russian nuclear waste. The movie quotes liberally from Jerry Bruckheimer’s school of filmmaking: there are helicopters, car chases and gun-fights-aplenty, while pretty much everything touched blows up. There is also a fair amount of flag waving, along with the obligatory questioning of the fractured relationship between the two Koreas.

Kyung-taek, to his credit, attempts to invigorative his film’s plot with a little soul: in this case arch villain Sin (Jang Dong-Gun) is also attempting to rescue his blind and dying sister from a Russian brothel. However, despite the director’s best efforts, Typhoon’s three main protagonists: naval officer Se-jong (Lee Jung-Jae), Sin and his sister Choi (Lee Mi-Yeon) are never characterised beyond melodramatic clichés. It’s fortunate then the action set pieces are handled with aplomb. Particularly impressive is the film’s climatic showdown on a freighter in a raging storm (hence the title Typhoon). It’s rumoured this is the most expensive Korean film ever made, and it’s certainly not hard to see where the money has gone.

Typhoon: a polished and reasonably entertaining – if somewhat overwrought and derivative – action extravaganza.—Caleb Starrenburg

See also:
» Woman is the future of this man: Hong Sang-soo’s Woman on the Beach
» Scenes by the Sea: Woman on the Beach
» Korean Film Festival ‘06: The Host, Duelist
» Monster Mash: The Host