Held Up
Director Kim Sung-hoon wades into the burgeoning embattled foreign national rescue genre.
RANSOMED
Director: Kim Sung-hoon • Writers: Kim Jung-yeon, Yeo Mi-jung
Starring: Ha Jung-woo, Ju Ji-hoon, Lim Hyung-guk, Kim Jong-soo, Park Hyuk-kwan, Yoo Seung-mok, Fehd Benchemsi, Burn Gorman, Kim Eung-soo, Marcin Dorociński
South Korea • 2hrs 13mins
Opens Hong Kong September 7 • IIB
Grade: B
An odd trend has emerged in Asian cinema over the past few years. In the way Hollywood doubles up on ideas – Armageddon and Deep Impact, Volcano and Dante’s Peak, Platoon and a million Vietnam dramas that followed – filmmakers in the region have been mining (or is it stoking?) fear of foreign places and the inherent threats posed to Asian people for recent actioners. It kinda sorta started with the OG rescue from scary sepia-toned places (up first: Yemen) movie, Dante Lam’s Operation Red Sea in 2018 (possibly inspired by the Oscar-winning Argo in 2012), which was followed by the likes of Ryoo Seung-wan’s Africa-set Escape from Mogadishu (2021), Rao Xiaozhi’s Home Coming (2022, which saw a pair of diplomats get 125 Chinese nationals out of “Numea”), and Yim Soon-rye’s The Point Men earlier this year, ironically set in… checks notes… Asia (Afghanistan). Japan has yet to wade into these waters.
The latest entry in this new mini-canon is Kim Sung-hoon’s Ransomed | 비공식작전, which, like most of these, is based on a true story to justify the fear. None of these films bother to interrogate the underlying need for ambassadorial flight, the politicking that surrounds exposure in strategic locations or the American-style imperialism everyone’s started playing at that propels these narratives. But I guess that’s another story. That said, Kim’s dusty theatrics are as much, if not more, about the inter-agency sniping and save-their-own-ass attitude of the Korean government departments that should have been looking out for their citizens rather than playing petty power games in Yeoido (not problems in Lam or Rao’s films).
Those would be the Atlas
Ransomed is a relatively brusque exercise in mainstream action filmmaking, powered by a lot of mugging from Along with the Gods co-stars Ha Jung-woo (The Handmaiden) and Ju Ji-joon (Netflix’s Kingdom) as desk-based mid-level diplomat Lee Min-jun and Beirut-based mercenary cabbie Kim Pan-su. The two team up in Lebanon (played by preferred stand-in Morocco) at the height of the country’s civil war in 1987 to find a Korean diplomat, Oh Jae-Seok (Lim Hyung-guk), kidnapped one year earlier. The details are being kept hush-hush because there’s an election around the corner at home in Korea, and the 1988 Olympics are coming. No one wants to look a fool. When the bored but ambitious Min-jun gets a call on the emergency line from the missing Oh, he sees it as his chance to rise in the ranks and get a cushy posting in the US or Europe. Getting Oh’s location involves all sorts of wheeling, dealing and cajoling with and by American and European power brokers, local rebels led by Karim (Fehd Benchemsi), and finally partnering with in-country, Arabic speaking taxi driver Pan-su, a self-serving weasel who only makes Min-jun’s job harder. On top of that, back in Seoul, foreign affairs minister Choi Gang-seok (Kim Jong-soo) finds himself and his department stymied at every turn by the snivelling, butt-hurt KCIA director (Kim Eung-soo), who blocks the ransom money transfer, and hangs Oh, Min-jun and Pan-su out to dry. Dick move.
Director Kim knows how to craft action with impact and string it along with some serious tension; check out the Kingdom if you need evidence, or better still the criminally underrated A Hard Day – and no, not the Aaron Kwok remake that blows the ending. But there’s a lot of fat on Ransomed’s bones, as polished as it is, much of it pivoting on Pan-su’s moral story arc, which could be trimmed significantly and improve the pacing. Is there any doubt he’s going to sack up and do the right thing in the end? Of course not, don’t bother teasing it. We know Min-jun is a pencil pusher who’s about to get schooled in real world politics, so can we drop the bug-eyed bafflement and fish-out-of-water stammering? That would shave off 15 minutes. The buttoned down pettiness he demonstrates in the office at the beginning tells us all we need to know. By the same token, Ju doesn’t do all that much to endear Pan-su to us; he’s hard to root for, even though we know he’s going to mend his ways before long. Ultimately the problem is that there are two movies here: one about a ransom and rescue, one about back room dealing in the halls of power, the abuse of that power and how it can so easily fail the people. They don’t really go together here, but the more grounded approach (yes the stammering) makes the story more apporachable than the glamorous badassery of Hyun Bin’s super-agent and Hwang Jung-min’s earnestness in Point Men. A taxi chase through hilly streets, an airport fake-out and some fun cloak-and-dagger antics do manage to distract us, which is going to have to do until the real story is declassified. One day. — DEK