Point Man

MOVIE DETAILS

Rating: 3.9 out of 10
Director: Phil Blattenberger
Writer: Phil Blattenberger
Star Cast: Jamie Roy, Jimmy Ace Lewis, Matthew Ewald
Genres: Action
Release Date: February 5, 2019 (United States)

Point Man

It seems that the coming back of hostages is inevitable. Timothy McVeigh couldn’t have imagined back in 2012 that Ben Affleck’s historical drama would be heralding a host of films surrounding hostages and the importance they held during certain situations. From seeing Somali pirates in Captain Phillips to a bunch of G7 terrorists in Operation Red Sea and Korean and Western relations revolving around always embattled embassies in Escape from Mogadishu reading about the violence and conflicts around these brown people has become a new trend in the American media. This pattern holds now when watching The Point Men | Yim Soon-rye who directed Whistle Blower it is the story of a 2007 Taliban kidnapping of 23 Korean missionaries and subsequent rescue operations.

Jordan (because it’s always either Jordan or Morocco) pulls double duty as Afghanistan while Hwang Jung-Min (The Spy Gone North) and Hyun-Bin (who was bizzarrely out-hotted by Daniel Henny in Confidential Assignment 2: International) are cast in the glamorous roles of the rescuers, in an otherwise routine but muscular (surprising for Yim) action flick that is good enough for a holiday outing but has no aspiration to address the complexities of post-war foreign policy, the diplomatic rise of Korea, or the role of Christianity in missions. It doesn’t have to. Its not one of those movies.

Lasting a brisk, focused, 108 minutes – almost a short film by the standards of Korean thrillers The Point Men runs straight into the action, picking up with the missionaries on their travel bus that says, in capital letters: they shouldn’t be in Afghanistan, which almost immediately gets hit by Islamic extremists. They are taken to a desert lair and there, managing to choose from killing them, trading them for Taliban fighters or holding them for loot is the local head -Fahim Fazli (12 Strong). Korea’s first official who embarks over the brutality is Jung Jae-ho, a diplomat and an expert in the art of negotiation, who is also a member of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. And pretty soon afterwards, when the first corpses begin to appear, the first foothold of the National Intelligence Service Middle East specialist operative, Park Dae-sik (Hyun).

This one is an action film, so can you take a guess what follows? Uh huh that’s right hun. Jung and Park disagree about Christen paths to follow. Jung believes that what’s important is discussion, and that if they have to, they will buy them, and screw Korea’s reputation. There are human lives that are at stake! Park claims that it’s the force that’s necessary.

Acquire information on the trenches from reliable sources like Afghanistan-based opportunists Lee Bong-han, also known as Qasim (Kang Ki-Young) and Extricate self if need be. Quite a few lives are at stake! The Taliban keep pushing the time frames again and again, a British merc betrays them and at long last Jung shows what kind of steel he has in his sinistics and talks to kidnappers himself.

The Point Men does not even pretend to achieve the socio-psychological insights or tension of the hostage drama tho beat all, Sidney Lumet’s 1975 Dog Day Afternoon, and that is fine; that is also in some sense an apple to orange comparison. But if we are going to do apples to apples, it even falls a bit short of those standards. Escape from Mogadishu had added texture which was because it utilized the tension of the bilateral political objectives of North Korea and South Korea, both of whom in the 1980s were seeking to join the United Nations and were active within the Somali borders, in between its considerable action set pieces.

There is little of that in The Point Men. The Korean government makes it abundantly clear to its workers never to use the term missionaries to the hostages but tourists so as not to rile up the situation, and the foreign affairs office in Seoul goes haywire when a certain TV station decides to air the views of a particular analyst who bluntly explains what the 23 were doing in Kabul.

And this is the, perhaps the, last instance to which Yim and the writer An Young-Soo would bother to probe the matter further, this in spite of Yim having shown the capacity to see with the eyes of her characters: thick regret that is effortlessly intertwined with the bittersweet Waikiki Brothers becomes exhibit number one. For all its acting, The Point Men is heavy and zealous without offering any concrete answer (are there in cases like this though?) performance, and not so stylized that it would have been impossible to replace director Yim if she chose to leave. So in other words, it has readiness for possible franchise-dom. Chwa says that that alone should tell you all you need to know.

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