One of three mainstream Korean blockbusters released recently that take place in a war-torn country—the other two being Escape from Mogadishu and Ransomed—and one of two based on a true incident, The Point Men, like Ransomed, deals with a hostage crisis in the Middle East and for reasons that aren’t too difficult to figure out, their structures and overall dramatic arc are almost identical. There’s an initially self-serving but eventually self-sacrificing diplomat who takes it upon himself to go over the heads of his superiors and negotiate with the kidnappers on his own terms. More significantly, there is a Korean national-gone-native in the respective countries where the movies are set who acts as the interlocutor with the foreign adversaries—in either case a totally fictional character and one who provides the comic relief that almost all Korean action films require, though, to me, the main utility of these characters is that they obviate the necessity for other Korean characters to speak English at length. Veteran star Hwang Jung-min, an actor I usually like, has already proved himself a terrible English speaker, and here, as the foreign ministry negotiator, he’s forced to use the language a little too much, so the relief provided by the interpreter is more than just comic.

Also like Ransomed, The Point Men is pitched as a kind of contentious buddy flick, though in the former the combo was the civil servant and the comic relief guy. Here, it’s the civil servant and a rogue Korean intelligence agent who wanders the Middle East doing God knows what in order to redeem himself for the death of a colleague at the hands of the Islamic State. (We first meet him getting sprung from prison for counterfeiting.) As played by the hunky-by-edict Hyun Bin, an actor who is guaranteed to boost box office outside of Korea (maybe inside as well, but these days those bets are off), this character, Park Dae-sik, really has nothing to do except bounce insults off of Jung Jae-ho (Kwang) in his attempt to save the day himself by rescuing 23 Korean missionaries who’ve been kidnapped by the Taliban in Aghanistan in 2007. This setup is one of the clearest examples ever of the cliche “based on a true incident” being deflective bullshit, because while a group of missionaries really was kidnapped by the Taliban in 2007, they certainly weren’t rescued by these two clowns in this way. Firstly, by all reports, the Korean people were quite pissed off about the missionaries, who used a loophole to sneak into a Muslim-majority country to proselytize and then cost the government a lot of money to secure their release—an aspect that is hardly discussed in the film. Secondly, Jung’s go-it-alone methodology when his superiors opt to try and rescue the hostages by force seems patently unreasonable, and was obviously contrived to inject dramatic tension into a story that didn’t really need it had it been told straight. And thirdly, Park’s existence is never less than superfluous, except for the mandatory car chase in which, riding a pilfered motorcycle, he endeavors to retrieve a couple million dollars in cash from some scammers in a GMC truck. 

The script occasionally shows signs of intelligence, especially with regard to how difficult it is for diplomats with no practical on-site experience to predict how representatives of different cultures are going to react to their overtures; but by the same token, the make-or-break final negotiation is so tortuously constructed for the sake of suspense that it inadvertently takes on a comic tone, as if Jung, who initially was more worried about PR than saving lives, turns into Super Negotiator simply and suddenly by force of will, rendering his Taliban counterpart a receding puddle in the face of his formidable intellect. The heroics in The Point Men is the whole point, but who really believes government factotums think or act this way? Certainly not the normally, and rightly, cynical South Korean public. 

In Korean, English, Pashtun and Arabic. Now playing in Tokyo at Toho Cinemas Hibiya (050-6868-5068), Toho Cinemas Shinjuku (050-6868-5063). 

The Point Men home page in Japanese

photo (c) 2023 Plus M Entertainment, Watermelon Pictures