A Korean drama thriller that focuses on a crisis negotiator from the Seoul Metropolitan Police Agency. Starring Son Ye-jin as Ha Chae-yoon the police negotiator and Hyun Bin as Min Tae-gu, the terrorist.
Story starts off with Chae-yoon negotiating for the release of two hostages when things got out of hand. This lead to the death of the hostages which devastated Chae-yoon so much that she submitted her resignation thereafter. While waiting for the request to process, she's been called in by the Police Commissioner to handle another hostage negotiation situation. Initially she wasn't briefed about this and was immediately tasked to talk to the terrorist Tae-gu. The latter earlier kidnapped two Koreans in Thailand and is holding them captive. Tae-gu was now spilling a conspiracy with Chae-yoon, about illegal arms deals, money laundering schemes and acts of bribery. Some officials tried to silence both until Tae-gu's lair was breached by the Korean special forces sent to Thailand that resulted to the bomb explosion killing everyone inside it.
Chae-yoon thought that Tae-gu and the hostages were dead however her great sense of observation suggests that Tae-gu wasn't in Thailand when the breach happened, in fact he was in Korea. This was later verified by pictures taken at the airport showing Tae-gu arriving days ahead of the negotiations. During this time Tae-gu went after the people who was responsible for the death of his sister. She was one of the hostages killed earlier in the film. Chae-yoon now knows why Tae-gu asked for her to start the negotiations. In the end, Tae-gu was killed by a team of soldiers and the conspiracy almost died with him until Chae-yoon revealed this to a proper court.
So what do we think of this movie? Many say its a good movie but somehow we had a hard time agreeing. The story is so muddled that we had a hard time following, understanding and believing some scenes in the movie. It's like a television series of 16 episodes then shrunk into one movie 114 minutes long. It should have been a fast and quick paced movie however everything is so slow.. you can stand up and go to the kitchen, prepare a snack and come back and you can still catch up with the story line. There were a lot of filler scenes we believe could have been cut to make it interesting.
First off, the lead Son Ye-jin's character of Ha Chae-yoon was supposed to be trained abroad to be a negotiator yet we always see her emotional and in most of the time crying. How can a a police negotiator send a trainee abroad and come back emotional? If she keeps on crying, how come she passed the training and given the authority to negotiate? When the hostages were killed while she was inside the premises, is this Korea's rule of engagement? Use the negotiator to distract the criminals to give enough time for the breaching team to enter? This disregard for the hostage's lives are a big question for us and she didn't even filed a report that this should never have happened unless Chae-yoon justifies it. Her character did handle the negotiations and it was all the terrorist Tae-gu getting the upperhand always. Hyun bin as terrorist was passable in performance as Min Tae-gu. Minus the outbursts in some scenes doesn't make sense, he was a lovable guy actually. Even if the other characters paint him as a terrorist, we somehow felt that he couldn't hurt the innocents. He showed us that the character had at least good moral values in spite of the kidnapping and the killing he made in the film.
All the other characters we just standing or scowling or shouting that I was now getting confused with their performances. I must admit it was distracting to see a lot of people just standing and watching as this drama unfolds. Might as well they should be sitting beside me. As we said the story line was muddled, actually its so simple. Lead gets confused in the beginning, resigns then gets back in active duty, to find out out that the terrorist is in fact was just asking for justice, and that the true bad guys were the higher ups or officers of the lead. Simple right? When you bring in another police member doing his own investigating and given a lot of screen time, a lot of officers giving a lot of screen time again just ordering to kill Tae-gu so that the conspiracy dies with him, that confused us or we felt the movie dragged. Maybe the plot is great, but I don't blame the actors for giving us this kind of a feeling. Its the story telling that made this movie unappealing for us. We do hope someone will do a reboot of this film as we like watching these kind of story plots. Maybe this should pattern the suspense and plot twists of The Negotiator starring Kevin Spacey and Samuel L Jackson. Maybe just maybe we can have a great film.
Currently showing in YouTube so you can watch the whole movie at the link given below.
