Harbin

Today in "hey, I wonder how various movies are doing in various theaters", Harbin opened on screen 6 at Causeway Street, which I think is the second-largest - it's located directly underneath the main screen in the part of the theater where one floor echoes the other, and my eyebrows went up when I saw it there, because it's a Korean film and while there were no big Hollywood releases this week, there were a bunch on Christmas, so - did they expect big things from Harbin? Did A Complete Unknown, Babygirl, or Nosferatu really just tank so hard at Causeway Street that this seemed a better use of the large screen? Does Harbin in particular have good buzz? Does the guy who programs Boston AMCs like Korean films and want the big war/spy movie on the biggest screen he can grab.

I dunno. This stuff's a mystery to me. But, hey, if you're gonna see it and have A-List, you've got three days to see it big.


Harbin

* * ½ (out of four)

Seen 3 January 2025 in AMC Boston Common #6 (first-run, laser DCP)
Not yet streaming; where to watch when it is

Harbin is the second movie I've seen recently where I was really glad the theater had laser projection, because a bulb being pushed past its useful life would have absolutely destroyed the many scenes where Korean freedom fighters gather in rather dimly lit rooms. Looks nice, but very well could have been a disaster.

(Not sure what the other one is, just that I had the thought. Could have been The Fire Inside or Day of the FIght. Of course, it would be hilarious if it was the 35mm print of Nosferatu and I was just thinking of good projection in general.)

Japan annexed Korea in the first years of the Twentieth Century, and soon there was a Korean Independence Army fighting for their freedom, though often from across the border in Russia. As the film opens in 1909, their last operation was a disaster: After surviving a battle where they were outnumbered, General Ahn Jung-deun (Hyun Bin) was loath to execute Japanese soldiers in cold blood as his comrade Lee Chang-sup (Lee Dong-wook) wished to do, leading to a later massacre. Ashamed of failing his people, he proposes a plan to assassinate outgoing Japanese Resident General Ito Hirobumi (Lily Franky) while he is making the case for the annexation. It's a plan that could fall apart in a number of ways - the Japanese are notoriously good at turning captured soldiers into moles - and the investigation is being led by Lt. General Tatsuo Mori (Park Hoon), whose vendetta against Ahn springs as much from not being allowed to commit ritual suicide as from all the Japanese soldiers Ahn's men killed.

"Looks nice, but could have been a disaster" goes for much of the movie, which springs from a notable incident but can only embellish it so much to stretch it into a thriller with tension and a story arc. The film is a short-for-South Korea 108 minutes, but even that includes a fair chunk devoted to an exceptionally bloody flashback to that first battle. Despite how Korean movies are often given plenty of room to breathe, co-writer/director Woo Min-ho doesn't do much to flesh out the ensemble cast or dig into its villains. There's a lot to be said for narrative efficiency, but this isn't necessarily that; Woo moves from event to event without a lot of fuss, but that mostly means he meanders quickly rather than packing multiple layers into every scene. I presume this incident is well-enough known in Korea that much of the home audience knows how it ends, so there's not even a lot of inherent suspense.

It goes through the motions all right, though, and sometimes does more. The opening of a man crossing a river that has frozen, thawed, and regrown enough times to create a series of crisscrossing lines is just the first of a number of striking shots, and the studio splurged on location shooting in Mongolia and Latvia (presumably doubling for Vladivostok) to keep pieces looking nice, although the film will likely revert to dark scenes with people in dark clothing soon enough. The filmmakers also sprang for Japanese star Masaya Nakagawa (aka "Lily Franky") as Hirobumi, giving the role gravitas even as he highlights how, as a politician, he is rather detached from the people dying amid all this fighting. Hyun Bin, Lee Dong-wook, and Park Hoon are all solid as the principals.

The filmmakers are sometimes shockingly up front with the violence, especially in the crucial battle that comes near the start of the film; it often becomes a brawl in the mud as soldiers run out of ammunition and resort to knives, with blood flowing from one slit throat like a waterfall and another Korean fighter stabbing a Japanese soldier so much as to decapitate him. Somewhere in all this, there could be an interesting movie about the various sorts of violence that exist in wartime: Ahn and Mori both feel the need to perform self-harm out of shame; Hirobumi talks about how annexing Korea is a mistake because the Korean people will be more difficult to handle than inbred royalty and scheming scholars while Ahn seems to grasp that war crimes are not just soul-destroying but bad tactics; the volunteer corps that the Koreans are fielding may have more "spirit" than Japan's professional military, but maybe the reason they have to worry so much about spies is because people who are soldiers out of inflamed patriotism rather than being committed to it as a way of life are going to be looking for a way their life can get back to normal. It's all there, I suppose - nothing in the film really contradicts these ideas and it's what I'm thinking about after the movie - but the film never really seems to stop and think about them itself. It's too focused on drawing up plans where the audience doesn't get the thrill of seeing them executed, or ferreting out spies from among candidates who are essentially identical.

More than anything, it's a black-and-gray movie that never finds a great storytelling hook beyond "this was an early, important event in Korea's fight for independence", and it could really use that. Instead, it's serviceable and not bad on an otherwise slow weekend, and I'll bet the patriotic bits play a lot better back home in South Korea.