The Unjust, Veteran, The Berlin File, Arahan, and Battleship Island are currently streaming on Netflix—I’ve seen all of them except Battleship Island—will be checking that one out soon.

Three years later I finally got around to watching this one! Your review sums it up well Zack, there’s some solid action buried under a lot of saccharine drama and heavy handed emphasis on how tough the conditions were (which is a crucial part of any movie covering Hashima, but the lack of subtlety here was overwhelming).

As one-dimensional as the Japanese were, I actually thought the Korean characters weren’t drawn much better. Hwang Jung-min is the salt of the earth everyman who we’re used to seeing him play (in fact there were parts of ‘Battleship Island’ where I thought it could just as well have been another segment in ‘Ode to My Father’), So Ji-sub is a tough guy gangster, and Song Joong-ki is a cool as a cucumber freedom fighter. Anything beyond those descriptions is non-existent, which sometimes made the emotional investment required in such a long movie feel somewhat lacking.

Ironically I thought the best action sequence was the bathhouse fight scene early on between (the likely heavily doubled) So Ji-sub and Kim Min-jae. It was brutal and hard hitting, whereas the bombastic finale fell into the classic trap of breaking its own rules by having characters stop shooting each other whenever our main cast need to give a dramatic speech before dying. Credit to the Chang Cheh style finish though of Ji-sub and Min-jae’s re-match!

The biggest show-stopper flaw for me was the scene involving the mid-film reveal you mention, in which Lee Kyung-young, Song Joong-ki, and Hwang Jung-min are debating with each other in a packed out room. The scene is a turning point and should be fraught with tension, but its strangely flat and actually begins to drag, feeling more like a line-reading session than the pivotal war of words its supposed to be. After that, for me the pace never really recovered, even when everything begins to go boom.

Yeah I think ‘The Unjust’ is my personal favorite as well. ‘Crying Fist’ did get a fantastic 2 disc Collectors Edition treatment from Hong Kong Legends sister label – Premier Asia – in the UK back in 2006. This is the version I have and I’d say it’s still worth picking up today, despite it not being a Blu-ray. There’s a heap of excellent bonus content if you’re a fan.

I would definitely recommend queuing up ‘Veteran’ the next time you’re in the mood for a raucous Korean action-comedy. Paul’s review is spot-on: http://cityonfire.com/veteran-2015-review-ryoo-seung-wan-korean-action-dvd/

The bummer thing about ‘Crying Fist’ is that it’s in Standard Definition on Prime (despite I think being listed as HD), so I haven’t watched it. ‘Veteran’ is in glorious HD, though.

Oh yeah, No Blood, No Tears was really good. I caught Crying Fist a couple years back and enjoyed that, too. I haven’t seen Die Bad or Veteran yet.

I just checked and Veteran and Crying Fist are both streaming now on Amazon Prime. Not quite the proper release you can put on your shelf, but it’s something!

I think ‘The Unjust’ is still my favorite Ryoo Seung-wan film by a long shot, although ‘Veteran’ and ‘No Blood, No Tears’ are pretty damn excellent too. I’d love to see some of his earlier movies, like ‘Die Bad’ and ‘Crying Fist,’ receive a proper Western release.

Hmm, you know, it’s been ages since I’ve seen ‘Arahan’ – it was one of the first Korean movies I saw and I can remember buying it on DVD at a comic book convention while riding the post-‘Oldboy’ buzz of the times. Somehow in my memory, all of the film’s gravity-defying leaps turned it into a superhero movie (is there a Spider-Man joke?), when it was probably more of a ‘Matrix’ and ‘Shaolin Soccer’-influenced action/comedy.

Re: the Park Guen-hye era, without spoiling too much there is a mid-film reveal in ‘Battleship Island’ that does easily tie it into the wave of recent Korean films like ‘Inside Men’ and ‘Master’ that are distrustful of political leadership, so it’s almost like Ryoo Seung-wan wanted to have his patriotic cake and eat it too.

I think you’ll enjoy the movie when you eventually decide to make the time for it, if only for Seung-wan’s technical prowess, but the film’s somewhat bombastic nature meant I was more than ready for a breather by the time the credits rolled.

I find it interesting how it’s incorporated the plight of comfort women, which has begun to appear more frequently in Korean cinema in recent years. It’s a subject which should be handled delicately, but is not always the case (a good example being the recent ‘I Can Speak’, which is largely a comedy about a grumpy old lady wanting to learn English, then does a complete U-turn later on and becomes an overwrought melodramatic tear jerker).

I’ll likely watch ‘The Battleship Island’ at some point, but the Ryoo Seung-wan I like is the one that makes well crafted contemporary action thrillers, although I respect his ambitions to tell a tale such as this one.

PS Interesting to see ‘Arahan’ referred to as a superhero movie, I’d never looked at it in that way before, rather seeing it as a contemporary spin on the wuxia genre.