Movie Review: Cold Eyes
On Sunday, March 16, 2014, I attended a
screening of Cold Eyes at the Castro Theatre in San Francisco as part
of this year's CAAMFest (The Center for Asian American Media Film
Festival). Cold Eyes is a thriller written and directed by Cho
Ui-Seok, co-directed by Kim Byung-Seo, and starring Han Hyo-Ju, Seol
Kyung-Gu, Lee Jun-Ho (aka Junho from 2PM), and my personal favorite,
Jung Woo-Sung. It was billed as a remake of a Hong Kong film called
Eye In The Sky, but having never seen Eye In The Sky, I am unable to
comment on its similarities or differences. Also, I admit that I was
there almost exclusively for Jung Woo-Sung (who once again did not
disappoint), but the movie itself turned out to be a tense and
tightly paced thrill ride that my companions and I all quite enjoyed.
What is more, the grandeur of the Castro movie palace's full-sized
screen — so rare in today’s era of multiplexes — was a special
treat for watching such a visually exciting film. Thank you so much
to CAAMFest for bringing Cold Eyes to San Francisco, and a special
thanks to the Castro for the venue!
Cold Eyes starts out in the subway,
with three seemingly unrelated individuals going about their
business. Jung Woo-Sung plays Sudoku with a fancy fountain pen
before taking a call from someone who wishes to place an order from
“National Food Market”; Seol Kyung-Gu dozes off with a newspaper
in his lap; and Han Hyo-Ju stands nonchalantly by the door in a
voluminous hoodie, but seems a little more than just casually
interested in Seol Kyung-Gu’s character.
Indeed, when Seol gets off the train,
Han follows him for quite some time. He attempts several maneuvers
that seem designed to shake a tail, but eventually he ends up eating
lunch in a fast-food restaurant, while Han eats her own food a few
tables away. Then suddenly, Seol confronts her, but
before she can run away, he reveals himself to be the Chief Detective
of the police surveillance unit. Apparently, Han had been taking
some sort of a test all this time, though she clearly hadn’t
realized her target was also her evaluator. Seol quizzes her on
everything she has seen, which she is able to recount with incredible
precision, including his exact route and timeline, the approximate
heights, builds, and clothing of everyone he had contact with, and
the number of minutes he spent on his cell phone. Han’s skills of
observation and recall earn her a spot on Seol’s team, which has
just received their newest assignment: catching a team of bank
robbers.
While Seol was administering Han’s
employment exam, Jung Woo-sung was robbing the bank. He is the
leader of his own team, and watches with a rifle scope from the roof
of a nearby building while his lackeys execute his precisely timed
plan, counting each second by the resonant ticks of his analogue
stopwatch and monitoring both their internal communications and those
of the police using the fancy listening equipment he carries in his
classic leather briefcase. (Which he hooks up to a flip phone. Ha!)
When the robbery is complete, the
entire team escapes just ahead of the police, thanks to a semi truck
that Jung signals to jackknife across four lanes of traffic at just
the right moment, allowing the criminal's van to squeak by but
causing all the police cars on their tail to fly spectacularly into the
trailer. The semi driver disappears on foot into a CCTV blind spot, while
Jung packs up his briefcase and calmly walks away. He’s such a
ghost that the police don’t realize he’s even there at first,
assuming that the six men they see in the bank and in the getaway
cars comprise the entire team. His character is billed as “James”
in the film’s promotional materials, but I can’t remember ever
hearing that name in the dialogue or seeing it in the subtitles, so
from now on I will call him the Shadow, which is the nickname he’s
assigned by the police once they eventually figure out he exists.
That night the Shadow goes to an old man running a cupboard-sized
shoe-shine shop and, using a hidden window in the back of the store to pass his car keys back and forth,
he delivers a portion of the bank proceeds, then leaves with the
assignment for his next job.
The next day, Han meets the rest of her
team, all of whom have animal code names: Seol is the Falcon, Junho
is the Squirrel, and the rest of the team are the Viper, the Mole,
the Parrot, and the Ostrich. Han asks to be the Reindeer, but she is
anointed “Piglet" instead. With a bit of luck, the electronic
surveillance team, led by Director Lee (actress Jin Kyung), has
identified the semi driver from the robbery, whom they nickname the
Thirsty Hippo, and it’s the menagerie’s job to track him down.
But he proves an elusive target, showing up only occasionally, at the
very edge of the CCTV ranges, and always walking straight into
another blind spot.
Over the next several weeks, while the
Shadow plans and executes the heist of some sensitive and potentially
incriminating financial records from a high-security corporate
storage facility, Piglet gets to know her teammates and their
methods. They systematically deploy in each numbered grid of the
city, first to identify possible matches, then to get close enough
for face-to-face confirmation. Each member of the team has his or
her own strengths and weaknesses, and the Falcon coordinates them all
from a van using cellophane grid maps and little wooden animal
figurines that look like demented chess pieces.
Throughout the film, the director uses
a lot of hand-held camera work — reminding me strongly of the
Bourne movies — which makes you feel almost as if you are right
next to the characters as they follow, surveil, and chase. They even
recreated one of the more memorable stunts from The Bourne Ultimatum
when the Shadow leaps through a window, then the Falcon jumps out
after him a moment later. Like in Bourne, the camera follows the
Falcon the whole way out. But Cold Eyes takes the stunt a step
further, keeping the camera with him even as he tumbles and rolls
along on the ground, making me and at least one other member of the
audience wonder how on Earth it was accomplished. (The other guy
asked the director about it during the post-screening Q&A, but
somewhere along the line his question was lost in translation so we
never got the real answer.) Such visual intimacy occasionally also
felt disorienting, but for the most part it was highly effective in
drawing me in and ratcheting up the tension, to the point where I was
literally on the edge of my seat for much of the film.
Cold Eyes was similarly reminiscent
of Enemy of the State (a 1998 chase thriller starring Will Smith),
for its almost pornographic depiction of surveillance technology,
including real-time CCTV footage and near-instant morphology-matching
software. But while Enemy of the State's technology was omnipotent,
near-infallible, and frenetically paced, Cold Eyes focused more on
its feet on the ground than on its eyes in the sky: The bulk of its
runtime was taken up by depictions of stakeouts, grid searches, and
extended, elaborate scenes of characters being followed. In fact, it
would probably be easy to lose a modern audience during some of these
more old-school spy sequences, but the spycraft scenes in Cold Eyes are so
dynamically choreographed and its plot is so expertly crafted that we
were never allowed to relax for long.
I was also reminded a bit of Drive
(2011, starring Ryan Gosling), in that the overarching story was
occasionally punctuated by sudden bursts of violence so extreme that
I inadvertently hid my eyes from the screen several times.
If you are easily offended by cinematic
glamorization of crime, violence, or law enforcement, then Cold Eyes
clearly is not the film for you. But if you’re the type of person
who won’t notice, won’t care, or else won’t let that ruin your
enjoyment of crime thrillers in general, you will certainly find Cold
Eyes to be one of the better-crafted examples of the genre. In
particular, I was impressed with how rarely the narrative lost focus,
how thoroughly it invested me in its characters, and how few plot
holes I noticed. I would have appreciated some more details about
the “National Foods Market” cover used by the Shadow when he
wasn’t robbing banks, which we got to see but I never quite
understood. Also, I did take particular exception to one glaring
character inconsistency and its improbable resolution near the end,
and a photo in the epilogue that I couldn't reconcile with the
preceding events. But for an action movie with a 118-minute runtime,
that’s a very impressive record.
Due to the nature of its genre, Cold
Eyes offered little in the way of character development, so none of
its actors were given the opportunity to display the kind of rounded
performances that win awards. But they all delivered solid work that
gave the film exactly what it required. The Falcon and Director Lee
both provided the perfect mixture of authority, experience, and
humanity, while the CAAMFest MC singled out Han Hyo-Ju in particular
for her performance as the Piglet. The Piglet was the clear star of
this film, and Han shouldered the responsibility with confidence,
portraying her character with toughness, heart, and razor-sharp
intelligence. But I was most pleasantly surprised by Junho as the
Squirrel. In spite of the high billing he received on some of the
promotional materials, and the fact that he got more screen time than
the rest of the menagerie (aside from Piglet and Falcon),
Junho’s Squirrel is not a huge role. Yet what little is there is
written and acted so likably that it came as a genuine shock to me
about 3/4 of the way through the film when a sudden threat made me
realize how emotionally invested in him I had become. One of my
companions was a 2PM fan going in to the movie, but even she had to
admit that she never expected Junho to be as good as he was!
And Jung Woo-Sung? As I already
started to suspect when I first fell in love with him in Padam
Padam…, Woo-Sung is consistently captivating. Cold Eyes represents
a significant departure for him in that it was his first time playing
a villain. That, combined with the fact that, despite his extensive
screen time, he had very little dialogue, meant that his role was
much more one-dimensional than I’m used to from him. But even
behind his coldly precise demeanor and cyborg haircut, the exquisite
facial expressions that make him such a dynamic dramatic actor
managed to crack his facade at just the right moments. The Shadow
proved to be quite an effective killer as well, giving Woo-Sung the
chance to show off his action-star credentials. First he turns the
tables on a would-be assassin sent by his “boss” to teach him a
lesson, then he dispatches a growing body count of individual
threats, including civilians, fellow criminals, and police, all with
brilliant, brutal efficiency.
And though they may have been limited,
the glimpses we got to see of his character's psyche were compelling.
I was particularly struck by the parallels between the Shadow and
the Piglet. While the Shadow was Piglet's opposite in gender,
experience, and empathy, they were also in a way two sides of the
same coin: both were astute, disciplined observers who excelled at
disappearing into their work. Yet while the Piglet was mentored by
the Falcon with compassion and humor, the Shadow's boss/mentor was
utterly ruthless. Not only did he try to kill the Shadow twice (that
we saw), but during the one scene in which we were treated to the
delight that is Jung Woo-Sung without his shirt on, we also clearly
saw the extensive scars of torture criss-crossing his back. I
couldn't help but wonder how the Shadow's path might have diverged if
he had met a different mentor back when he was the Piglet's age.
Similarly, the Shadow and the Falcon are both the experienced,
meticulous leaders of their respective teams, who observe and
coordinate from their personal perches (the Shadow from his rooftops
and the Falcon from his van), making for an interesting parallel
between their two characters as well.
I was genuinely convinced that it was
these nuances in his character and the charisma of his performance
that made me secretly root for the Shadow the whole movie, and not
just my unabashed bias for Jung Woo-Sung, but the unanimous
disagreement of my companions put paid to my delusion. I do feel
compelled to point out, however, that empathizing with the villain,
in spite of his villainy, imbued the story with even greater stakes
for me: Every confrontation was an exquisite torment as I yearned
for the Shadow to acquire his targets, to escape, and to build
himself a new life away from all the crime and violence, yet remained
equally anxious for the good guys to triumph, and, most of all, to
be safe.
With or without a massive Jung Woo-Sung
bias, Cold Eyes was an excellently crafted piece of cinema. It
wasn't completely flawless, but it was certainly well above average
for its genre, earning five stars out of five from everyone in my
party. If you ever get a chance to see it, especially in a theatre,
drop everything and run!
Seriously, run fast. The Shadow is
watching...
*Picture credits to the owners.