26 Years (2012)

For film three of my Korean Week I watched a political thriller, and honestly I was completely baffled by 26 Years (Geun-hyun Cho, Late Spring.) It's such a mixed bag in terms of quality, and often comes across as a botched job. And yet behind all that cosmetic mishap is a truly moving story of a tragedy that occurred 38 years ago (26 in the movies time.) But I'm not sure with how much grace and finesse this film portrays its touching story, and that may be its biggest flaw.

26 Years is about the Gwangju Uprising in 1980. I wasn't familiar with the event until I saw the film, but having researched it after the film its truly saddening to hear. Student protesters were brutally murdered by military troops while protesting, something the film and many critics attribute to the president Chun Doo-hwan. And the first thirty or so minutes of the film is such a devastatingly harrowing experience as it details through animation the suffering of protesters at the time, watching as they are violently murdered. It then shows the aftermath, following various victims and the trauma they now suffer with. It's horrible to watch as a mother is horrified to see even an image of the president, striking her own son in pure psychological torment. This part of the film feels like what the director was trying to convey, and is the most interesting part. What follows is not only less interesting, but a confusing mess of a thriller.

Essentially the children of various victims band together under the leadership of an ex-soldier, from the tragedy itself, to assassinate the ex-president. It's fictional, and the films lets you know during its opening credits, but it has clear ties to the original incident. And this is something the film sometimes seems to forget. Occasionally the film will just turn into some mafia movie, where the president is this one dimensional villain with nothing to do but be rude and flick pistachio shells out of a car window. And I feel like this may have been intentional, it's referenced toward the beginning that a shot of the president being exonerated from prison looks like it's straight from a mafia movie. But if it was intentional then it seems almost disrespectful. Clearly the actual president wasn't some one-sided villain. And yet the film also seems to know this? At times the film does deal with issues such as "was he such a bad guy if he fixed the economy" and "do you blame the soldiers that murdered the people, or the man who gave the orders" and these are genuinely interesting topics up for discussion. But whenever the film goes into them, it's almost as if it's too scared to elaborate and quickly dismisses them for some mafia-esque action.

And this is when things get even more confusing. The whole plan to assassinate the president is the main focus for about an hour and fifteen minutes. And yet over that time I didn't have a single clue what the actual plan was, who was who, and where their allegiances lay. For example near the beginning of the assassination plot, it seems as if they are meant to stall the presidents' convoy and for the sniper to take a shot. Only the sniper is on the street for some reason, and the man who is meant to stall them decides not to. So the sniper goes up to the car to shoot the president, but the gun she's using isn't strong enough to puncture the window, so he survives. Then the one who didn't stall the president before is decides he wants to try and help the woman, and oh god my head hurts.

Later on in the film things get more confusing as it is apparent that there really isn't a plan at all. In fact it's really just whoever is in range take a shot (at least that's the impression I got). If you hit great, if not the next person will try. The problem with this is that everything gets put out of focus. It's not really clear what is going on, so when something does happen you're not really sure why it is impactful meaning the ending feels completely undeserved. Without spoiling too much there's a love subplot, but it's only developed in one scene before the finale, and then brought back up again in the last few moments of the film. But it comes so out of left field that you're left wondering when the hell these two ever had feelings for each other.

But this film is still so Korean through and through. The ending is as bombastic as A Bittersweet Life (Jee-woon Kim, 2005) (and if you haven't seen that then what I mean is it's absolutely nuts) there is just so much carnage. However, in a way this carnage seems out of place. I'm not one to complain about a great Korean action-packed finale, but here it just feels weird. This very serious and horrific event seems boiled down to action movie tropes and a dramatic ending. We are meant to feel a sense of redemption toward the end, but it's done using a love subplot, and so much blood and violence that it left me wondering how any of this carnage is any better than what happened back in 1980. And I'm not comparing a handful of deaths to the thousands that died then, but it seems confusing that this was the ending they went for, it makes their muddled message even murkier.

So even as a movie about those events (or what the director would like to do to the guy responsible for those events) it's not worth seeing. True the first thirty minutes are phenomenal, but after that the movie is such a confusing slog to get through. Tonally it makes no sense, the character's are poorly developed (as are their relationships), the pacing is appalling and the plot is completely nonsensical. This is a film you should miss, or if you watch it then stick around for the first thirty minutes and then switch it off.

3/10