Directors in Focus: Yoon Jong-bin | The Spy Gone North (2018) Review

Director: Yoon Jong-bin

Notable Cast: Hwang Jung-bin, Lee Sung-min, Cho Jin-woong, Ju Ji-hoon, Jung So-ri, Kim Hong-pa, Gi Ju-bong

Set in the year 1993, a man named Heuk Geum-seong is sort of pulled against his will into becoming a spy for South Korea. He goes by the codename Black Venus and is posing as a businessman selling Chinese products in Beijing, snowballing into linking up with the North Korean government in hopes of acquiring intel on North Korea, Kim Jong-il, and digging into the state of their nuclear weapons and seeing just how powerful the hidden country may be. This is based on a true story, and of course, with any film of this nature, there will always be details altered for dramatization purposes, but with this end result in the form of The Spy Gone North, what we have is a powerfully told story of espionage that doesn't find itself stuck in the genre trapping of most spy films. There are no guns fired and no real action set pieces. Instead, the intensity, which is almost unbearable at times, comes from the real-life threat of the situation, which unfortunately remains true to this day, and the looming threat of war breaking out at any moment. This is right up there with the very best work from Yoon.

Directors in Focus: Yoon Jong-bin | Nameless Gangster (2012) Review

Director: Yoon Jong-bin

Notable Cast: Choi Min-sik, Ha Jung-woo, Kwak Do-won, Ma Dong-seok, Kim Sung-kyun, Kim Hye-eun, Cho Jin-woong, Kim Young-sun

During the sort of boom of Korean cinema in the early 2010s, many films came out that I consider to be absolute modern classics, some even masterful pieces of genre film. Among them, and there is a decent amount, would be one in the gangster genre. It has one stellar ensemble cast, including the likes of Choi Min-sik, Kwak Do-won, Ma Dong-seok, who was becoming increasingly popular at the time, and the same could be said for Cho Jin-woong. It is no surprise, but most certainly welcome that Yoon's muse and long-time collaborator, Ha Jung-woo, would also star alongside Choi, making for a fierce dynamic duo that lights up the screen from start to finish. Nameless Gangster: Rules of the Time is a bona fide gangster film through and through, and it absolutely deserves to be placed among the best of the best from any period of time in cinema history.

It's the year 1990, and a massive war on crime has been declared by Busan police officials as corruption and criminal activity have soared to an all-time high. We bounce back and forth throughout the '80s and early '90s as we see the rise and fall of Choi Ik-hyun (Choi Min-sik), a customs officer who is near losing his job and completely down on his luck, until one fateful night when he finds himself upon a one-way ticket into the criminal underworld, in which he finds out that he just may be better at than he ever imagined. He teams up with a distant family member Choi Hyung-bae (Ha Jung-woo), who has been in the game for many years. The two hit it off, and Ik-hyun finds himself quickly rising to power, and the things it cost him along the way only seem to make him more powerful in the end. Things get twisty and turny, as you can imagine with any film in the genre, and lies and deceit come into play, and a lot of things are smashed into peoples' skulls as a result, and I mean a whole plethora of objects. I'll just say I can't imagine the amount of glass that a certain character gets embedded into his scalp and how long it must've taken to be dug out. Eesh.