South Korea’s 2012 contender for a foreign language Oscar feels more like a war movie than a movie about the Korean war, right up until its pitilessly bleak final frames. Though the American presence in that war is peripheral to its story, Hollywood clichés pervade The Front Line, from its slate and sepia tones to its stock company of characters and dialogue that translates macho posturing into present-day slang. And yet the movie has its startling moments, moments with the spark of specificity and the bitter clarity of perspective. Those stabs of the unexpected culminate in an ending that refuses to raise even the mildest or most melancholy flag of redemption.
Is it worse for history to downplay a war as pivotal as this one or for the culture to overlook it entirely? Roughly based on true events, the film gives a grunt’s eye view of a conflict that some feel has been forgotten in popular retellings of the 20th century, despite the efforts of Don Draper and co. Perhaps this under-representation drove director Jang Hun to go for broke in telling the story of the end of the Korean civil war in 1953.
The genre poaching begins with the flimsy hook of a mole investigation: An officer named Kang Eun-Pyo (Shin Ha-Kyun) is sent to the front to explore the apparent assassination of the famed Alligator Company’s commander. There he finds a group of men poised on the border of insanity, and among them an old friend name Kim Soo-Hyuk (Ko Soo). Since Kang last saw him Kim has been transformed from a frightened naïf into a soulless killer -- the ruthless soldier who’s too cool to die, too hot to live. A rivalry seethes between the two friends about who has seen the worst of the…
Ananda Lewis Angela Marcello Angelina Jolie Anna Faris Anna Friel Anna Kournikova Anna Paquin AnnaLynne McCord
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