South Korean director Kim Jee-woon has produced a trifecta of back-to-back successes with “A Bittersweet Life,” “The Good, The Bad, The Weird” and the deliciously dark “I Saw The Devil,” probably his finest accomplishment. Then something happened —he went Hollywood. The filmmaker tried to cross over with “The Last Stand” starring Arnold Schwarzenegger, which didn’t quite work out. In the interim, he’s made a couple of shorts, but now he’s back with his next feature, and hopefully it finds him back in top form.
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“The Age Of Shadows” stars Song Kang-ho and Gong Yoo in a period set tale about resistance fighters squaring off against Japanese police as they try to halt the independence movement. Here’s the synopsis:
Set in the late 1920s, The Age of Shadows follows the cat-and-mouse game that unfolds between a group of resistance fighters led by Gong’s character, trying to bring in explosives from Shanghai to destroy key Japanese facilities in Seoul, and Japanese agents trying to stop them. Song plays a talented Korean-born Japanese police officer who was previously in the independence movement himself and is thrown into a dilemma between the demands of his reality and the instinct to support a greater cause.
“The Age Of Shadows” opens in South Korea in September, and will hopefully at least land on the festival circuit stateside. There’s no U.S. distributor at the moment. [The Film Stage]
