Secret Reunion (2010)

While it doesn't offer any answers, it both thrills and makes you think.

One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Mostly, the movie is committed to the value of a good time.

This is a small, humorous movie in some ways, but it has a huge heart. What a nice experience.

Bromantic thriller involving sleeper agents tasked with silencing North Korean defectors. Well-made but mostly by the numbers plot enlivened by Korean favorite Song Kang-Ho (The Host, Memories of Murder) acting among weaker supporting characters. Some nice action scenes with co-lead Kang Dong-won keep things moving at a brisk enough pace. Story doesn't aim very high and wraps with a finish that's a little too tidy, despite the two hour runtime.Forgettable but ultimately fun, probably for Korean thriller fans only. Jang Hoon also directed the similarly competent Korean War drama The Front Line (2011).

Secret Reunion is a reminder that geographic distance alone is never a cultural barrier. One could even get away with calling this spy/thriller/buddy with a dash of comedy formulaic. Maybe it is. I might just be fooled by the foreign language, but Secret Reunion Is not just familiar, but fresh. The film hinges on the relationship between two opposing intelligence agents. Both have been abandoned by country and separated from family. Kang-ho Song plays the damaged bumbling South Korean field agent. I enjoyed his performance more than anything in this film. I cannot logically justify this, but this is the third film were he felt like a Korean Humphrey Boggart. Yes this is crazy, but how could I better articulate this man's natural charisma? Dong-won Kang has a tougher roll as the desperate emotional despondent North Korean operative. His character was just written uninteresting, but he holds his own while interacting Song. Perhaps a weakness of the film is that I enjoy it when these two simply coexisting more than when they are chasing each other. I guess something has to justify the action sequences. Nothing surprising here, except possibly the institution of foreign brides to western audiences. A sociologist might find its portrayal interesting, I just enjoyed how it forced Song to reach for moral justifications. Otherwise, the story is cookie cutter and wraps up so unrealistically clean you would think Reunion briefly teleported to Hollywood. But hey, Casablanca was made by recipe, so I can give this movie half a pass. It is hard to completely recommend a benign spy film. I think those who have previously other Korean smash hits will dig Secret Reunion. Song's performance provides just enough to outshine the truly mediocre. Just please don't ignore this endorsement because of the insane Boggart comparison.

Another very good Korean production, this time a spy thriller. Frankly, my biggest problem with this movie was a technical one--it streamed in a jerky, stuttering fashion the whole way through. I have never had this happen before, and have no idea what the problem was. After a while you kind of adjusted to it, although it remained distracting throughout. Also, sometimes the subtitles were cut-off at the bottom of the screen, which was very annoying. Once again, the modern Korean movie industry has far outdone nearly any current American production in terms of intelligence of the script. This particular film didn't have much of the fast-moving action typical of Asian movies dealing with this kind of material, which didn't bother me at all since the plot had a lot of depth and twists to maintain interest; however, there was not much of the wit and humor I have also come to expect from Korean movies, which was a big disappointment for me, and the primary reason I'm dropping it's rating a little bit. It was very interesting to see a film dealing with the North/South Korean split from the point of view of Koreans and not our straightforward American perspective, although North Korea still hardly comes off well. (I guess there's only so much you can do with pure evil.) The situations and emotions just feel so much more morally complex and real than those found in pretty much any American movie nowadays. So, in conclusion, while lacking in the action and comedy that I have come to expect from the best of Korean cinema, "The Secret Reunion" is still much better than just about anything our fat and lazy film industry puts out nowadays. It seems like today, you really have to go foreign to get the good stuff.

South Korean agent in charge of an attempt to catch a North Korean assassin named Shadow resigns when it all goes south. Six years later he hooks with and plays cat and mouse with an North Korean agent who was branded a traitor as the result of the same botched job.Fantastic action sequences get lost in a action/buddy/comedy that with a few changes might very well have come from Hollywood. The problem with the film is the center section of the film where the two men try to figure out what the other one is doing without letting on what their own situation is (both think that the other is better connected to the other side than they really are) I liked it but I didn't fall in love with it. Certainly it was a film that made me ponder what such a clear Hollywood clone was doing in the New York Asian Film Festival which strives to promote the un-Hollywood film or films unlikely to get a US release, I can see this very clearly getting a US DVD release if nothing else.Not a bad film by any stretch, its just not a particularly remarkable one.