Yaksha: Ruthless Operations: The Thing of It

You may not have heard of the Chinese city of Shenyang but it's bigger than Hong Kong, Rio, or L.A.. and home to one of the largest Koreatowns in the world. It's also the setting of the spy flick Yaksha: Ruthless Operations in which the reinstatement of self-righteous Prosecutor Han (Park Hae-soo) depends on surviving gunfights and fistfights among South Koreans, North Koreans, Chinese, Japanese, and Russians what want "that thing you were going to give me" — as top black ops guy Ji Kang-in (Sol Kyung-gu) puts it. (That "thing" probably has to do with reunification!)

So can a small crew completely dressed in black take on every other nation's secret service in order to save an imperiled, orphaned daughter who likely has whatever it is they need? Writer-director Na Hyeon's crime pic has tension aplenty but no true suspense. No sane moviegoer doubts whether the good guys will prevail. This is vigilante justice, which tends to be infallible on screen. "If we were work by the law then we can't accomplish anything." And based on how the American Supreme Court is swinging, you'll likely fantasize about the three musketeers instead. (Enter Lee El, Park Jin-young, Song Jae-rim with guns cocked.)

The Prison: Who Runs The Law?

Yes, it's preposterous. Yes, it's cynical. Yes, it's horrific. But The Prison is also incredibly, impossibly fun. By taking one penitentiary's inner workings — the guard-inmate sycophancy, the convict hierarchy, the black market trading, the perverted politics — to their most extreme possibility, Na Hyeon's screenplay is a deliriously enjoyable improbability, a twisty-turning political Rube Goldberg machine of crime, cruelty, and power-tripping. The struggle for supremacy between the sadistic old-timer convict Ik-ho (Han Suk-kyu) and the contentious ex-cop newbie Yu-gon (Kim Rae-won) is one of those gloriously gripping, cinematic pissing matches in which who might win remains unknown until the very end.

Is this a movie about corruption? Does it glamorize corruption? Even as it exposes corruption's insidious ubiquity inside South Korea's judicial system? Is it even taking a stance on corruption? Is it, perhaps, some strange adult counterpart to Na's anti-fascist kids cartoon Leafie, A Hen in the Wild? All valid theories, in my humble opinion. In fact, how you interpret this one is definitely up to you. Regardless, I'm guessing that whatever your ideological take, The Prison's final scene is going to make your head spin in that it's one of the most anti-Hollywood endings I can imagine, a bizarre restoration of karmic balance that goes against traditional movie ideas about good and bad and the "ends justify the means" philosophies. Have I got you intrigued yet? Are you thoroughly perplexed and enticed? Good. Now watch the damn movie.