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A shoot-out at the border between North and South Korea left 2 soldiers
of the North Korean border patrol dead, but somehow a great deal about the
shoot-out simply doesn't add up, like the fact that a South Korean
soldier, Lee (Lee byung-hun), was kidnapped by the North Koreans, and
another South Korean, Nam (Kim Tae-woo), tried to save him single handedly
... so, to prevent a war, the Neutral Nations Supervising Commission sends
one of their top investigators, Sophie Jean (Lee Yeong-ae], a Korean woman
born and raised in Switzerland, to investigate ... but at first she is met
only by closed doors: The only North Korean who surived the incident, Oh
(Song Kang-ho) sticks to his obviously made up story Sophie already has on
file, Nam, the soldier who allegedly saved Lee from the North Koreans,
throws himself out of a window when he is threatened with a lie-detector
test, and Lee physically attacks Sophie soon afterwards.
Ultimately though, Sophie finds a few answers, like the fact that Nam
and Lee at some point made friends with the North Korean soldiers, Oh and
Yeong (Shin Ha-kyun), and at night often sneaked across the border to pay
them a visit, play some cards and party a bit, making peace on the small
scale that the politicians never managed to make on the big scale.
however, this is interrupted when Oh's and Yeong's superior one day
catches the South Korean's at the North Korean post and immediately wants
to shoot them. Oh does his best to calm the situation, but eventually a
shot is fired, and b efore you know it, Lee and Nam have killed Yeong and
his superior in self defense. Oh helps them escape nevertheless out of
friendship ...
These facts of course shed a whole new light on the case, but there is
pretty little investigator Sophie can do anymore since she was taken off
the case after Nam's suicide. There is just one thing that bothers her:
That it was actually Lee who fired the first shot ... and eventually, Lee
commits suicide because of it.
Not a bad thriller, but a bit overambitious: The film tries to be
political commentary, political thriller and old-fashioned murder mystery
all at once ... and falls shrt of its goals. Somehow the political baggage
doesn't go too well together with genre specifications, and the great
number of flashbacks just can't hide the fact that the story is not all
that interesting (and could have done with a shorter running time. Still,
not a bad film, just nothing to write home about.
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