The Yellow Sea (2010)

The Yellow Sea opens with taxi-driver Gu-nam recounting a rabies epidemic which infected his dog when he was a child. The dog ate its mother and was only deterred from a killing rampage when Gu-nam’s
neighbours almost beat it to death. The dog escaped but later returned, emaciated and wild. Gu-nam killed and buried it, only for his neighbours to later dig it up and eat it. Overall, the dog had an easy life
compared to that endured by Gu-nam.

Gu-nam is a joseonjok (an ethnic Korean-Chinese) who lives in Yanbian, an intriguing, but rather scary pocket of China which borders North Korea and Russia. In order to clear his debts to gangster Kyun, Gu-
nam exchanges the poverty and violence of life in Yanbian for the poverty and violence of life in Seoul. His mission is to murder an anonymous man, but while he’s there he also plans to find and murder his
unfaithful wife. So far, so good.

Part taut crime-thriller, part gangster slasher-fest, The Yellow Sea is a film of two extremely distinct parts. As Gu-nam makes the treacherous journey to Seoul and plans his attack, all the while plagued by
bitter jealousy of his wife’s new life and guilt over their young daughter, we are fully immersed in his unenviable situation. ‘Remember to cut off his thumb’ is one thing I never thought I’d have to restrain myself from shouting in the cinema, but this one gruesome act sets in motion a chain of events, which, to be honest, becomes difficult to follow.

The Yellow Sea maintains a simmering tension in its first hour that explodes into a frenzied erruption in its second.

As Gu-nam flees the scene of the magnificently botched murder, we witness the first of many utterly ludicrous, yet completely mesmerising, chase sequences. He escapes, of course, only to become the mouse to many, many cats. Competing gangster families and the whole South Korean police force are out to kill Gu-nam and eachother, resulting in frequent hack-and-slice-fests, the like of which I’ve never seen before.

As the hunted becomes the hunter, the other characters involved in the complex negotiations and betrayals stemming from this single murder continue to get medieval on each other and the plot spirals
out of control. The Yellow Sea fighting logic dictates that an axe beats a knife, but a large bone beats an axe.

 The sheer magnitude of the violence betrays a director who has chosen what he can do, over what he should do !

Gu-nam’s hunt for his wife, the real motivation behind the igniting spark of violence and arguably the most absorbing part of the story, becomes a minor sub-plot as a game of ‘who can sustain the most life-threatening injuries and live’ takes over.

The film could do with losing at least half an hour from the closing section and although the fate of all involved is clear from the outset, the final saddening death is particularly hard to stomach.

Conclusion

The Yellow Sea is a brutal take on life at the bottom of society’s food chain and an animalistic depiction of the will to survive. The overall message of  The Yellow Sea’s excessive violence is one of futility, but
this futility infects the film as a whole, revealing its reliance on the rhetoric of brutality to be a poor distraction for the lack of engaging plot underneath.

 The Yellow Sea (2010), 9.5 out of 10 based on 4 ratings