2 / 2 directing & technical aspect
2 / 2 story
1 / 1 acting
0 / 1 pacing
1 / 1 dialogue
1 / 1 living up to its genre
0 / 1 originality
0 / 1 lasting ability to make you think
0.......misc enjoyment point (+/-)
7 out of 10
Act II on the train is a masterpiece.
Kang-ho Song is effing awesome in EVERYTHING he's in. Especially anything directed by Chan-wook Park.
If you liked this, check out The Good, the Bad, and the Weird. Same director, Jee-woon Kim, and Kang-ho is hilarious in it.
It's absolutely mindboggling again and again what the Korean's are able to do with a puny budget, like the $9 Million for this one. The set and costume design, production values in general and everything were so spot on as usual, amazing!
Tho as Manny said, the movie was maybe a tad too long but besides that another brilliant piece in Kim Jee-Woon's book of which I've seen them all. Fantastic cast and better than 2015's "Assassination" which was similar in setting.
Well worth your time!
An exquisite array of tension-building sequences and cathartic ultra-violent showdowns riding at a notch below its competence due to the overlong, aimless narrative. The lack of direction shows in an otherwise deft screenplay with great performance and score.
Korean epic The Age of Shadows has everything and nothing it needs to excellent: espionnage, action, and not the slightest whiff of romance.
It stumbles to catch its footing in the over-long first act (and you have to read a lot of subtitles to grasp the basic intrigue of the film), but it really hits its stride in the second with suspense, on-point directing and top notch acting (the ensemble cast includes Song Kang-ho (Parasite, The Host, Memories of a Murder, Snowpiercer...)).
Like every truly great film, The Age of Shadows demands interest, but pays off big time for the attention you pay it.
Shout by Manny CalaveraBlockedParent2017-03-11T03:04:54Z
Another great movie by the legendary Kim Jee-Woon. While a tad too longer, the best sequence which would remain is the train sequence which is one of the masterpieces of suspense.