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 ilmido" tries to be two things: a scathing
indictment of an embarrassing footnote in Korean history, and a high-octane
action blockbuster. This split personality -- political treatise/money maker
-- creates a movie that is certainly watchable, but too inconsistent in tone
to be either adrenalin pumping or emotionally captivating. The film opens in
1986, with the South Korean government conscripting a group of death row
convicts into a the top-secret Silmido unit, whose sole purpose is the
assassination of North Korean president Kim Il-Sung.
The first half of
"Silmido" is an extended training sequence and follows the men as
they train under the merciless gaze of the camp Commander, trying to endure
not only physical pain but also the emotional turmoil of training camp clichés.
Most of these can be categorized by montage sequences. For example:
out-of-shape convicts can't keep up with the trainers, movie time passes,
now their trainers can't keep up with them! And then there's this: the
convicts are shooting at targets and missing terribly. Look! Now they're
hitting the targets with ludicrous accuracy.
You get the picture.
The prisoners gradually shed their tough skin
(actually, not too tough; they're pretty nice for convicted felons), do
the bonding thing, and completely sacrifice their individual identity for
the "cause." This is the upbeat part of the movie. By the
time Assassination Day Eve arrives, the Silmido unit has been transformed
into a single-minded killing machine. They're so well trained that the
Commander decides to give them the night off so they can bond as all men
do, by drinking alcohol out of a gigantic jug and pretending to be women,
of course.
This was a pretty boring/disturbing scene, so I
amused myself by listing, in my head, the order in which the major
characters would die. I figured we would be branching off into Dirty Dozen
territory soon. That's when I got a surprise. At the very last moment the
mission is cancelled, but the Silmido troops are already in their boats
and about to do a little suicide missioning. The Commander's men have to
threaten the assassins with gunfire in order to get them to return.
The prisoners have become more obsessed with the
mission than the military. And here's where the movie gets interesting.
The now purposeless Silmido troops begin to revert back to their former
ways. Training becomes lackadaisical and senseless, tempers short and
dangerous. Even the commanding officers grow complacent; there is, simply
put, nothing for any of them to do now that the mission, the sole purpose
of their existence, has been taken away.
Things escalate until two members slip off base and
rape a nurse, a scene filmed in a blasé manner that serves to remind the
audience, if just for a moment, the kind of men they may have found
themselves rooting for. And it gets worse. Things have settled down on the
political front, so the original purpose of the Silmido troops has come to
pass. The Commander suggests to his higher ups that they assign the unit
somewhere else, but the government won't hear of it. They want the Silmido
troops terminated.
This leads to one of the strangest action sequences
I've ever seen. The two sides of the training camp -- prisoners and
soldiers -- engage in a battle that neither side wants to happen. It's the
government that's clearly to blame, and if we haven't gotten it yet,
there's still another two or three epilogues left, ending in a standoff
between the Silmido troops and the Korean army.
"Silmido" is not a bad movie. It's well
made, and though the characters are paper thin, the acting is quite good.
Unfortunately, it can't decide what type of movie it wants to be.
"Silmido" is not realistic enough to be a convincing historical
drama, nor does it have enough action to qualify as a slam-bang war flick.
In the end "Silmido," much like the men it portrays, lacks
identity.
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