Tyubeu

Taking a dose from "Speed", "The Rock", and "Die Hard", the South Korean movie TUBE is just your average shoot'em up and blow'em up actioner. It takes its cues more from your average Hollywood summer fare, with an outrageous premise and a variety of cliches only possible in similar silly action movies.

TUBE has going for it an intriguing villain, but the hero is not quite so interesting, even if the film spends more than 25 of the first 30 minutes on his back story. The character of the girl who falls in love with the hero and basically stalks him around south Korea is a bit disturbing, mostly because it's so silly and unbelievably "kiddie" stuff.

Not to say that TUBE isn't a worthwhile movie. It has its share of exciting action set pieces, but for the most part the film lacks brain cells, which isn't much of a surprise for action movies. And yet, TUBE just doesn't seem to understand that criminal masterminds don't leave a spunky girl alive even after she's fouled up his plan for the 50th time. Outrageously silly.

5 out of 10

STAR RATING:*****Unmissable****Very Good***Okay**You Could Go Out For A Meal Instead*Avoid At All Costs

Cop Jay is intent on busting criminal mastermind .T.When he hi-jacks an underground train,he finds the perfect opportunity to make this happen.

This slow and overlong action thriller takes nearly two hours to tell a story that could have been wrapped in an hour and a half.For an action film,said action is not exactly in plentiful supply either.

It's intriguing (for me,anyway) and certainly very nice to catch a slice of Oriental action cinema,but when it's something so ultimately perfunctory and ordinary,it just ends up feeling so much more pointless.If you want to watch an action thriller set on board a train,rent Under Siege 2 with Steven Seagal,it's far superior.**

Korean cinema of late has produced some highly entertaining and diverting pieces of work. Sadly this film is not amongst them. From the opening scene when about 4 bad guys manage to gun down about half the Korean police force but don't sustain any injuries themselves, you know that you should have your tongue firmly planted in your cheek. The problem with this film is that there is no character development and it relies on action set-pieces to carry the film along. Some of these are OK, but many are just not believable. In the Making Of documentary on the DVD release, it says that the film was 5 years in the making. It's a pity that over that length of time, no one realized that the script needed a complete rewrite.

TUBE (2003): While I can't highly recommend it, it is kind of fun, provided you don't think too much about the plot, which has a walking stereotype loose-canon cop (Kim Seok-hoon) battling a terrorist (Pak Sang-min) onboard a hijacked subway train. The terrorist is a former government eraser that the government tried, but failed, to erase, and he's taken the train, and Seoul's mayor, hostage to uhh, well, to apparently have the plan be doomed from the start. Equal parts SPEED, TAKING OF PELHAM 123, MONEY TRAIN and DIE HARD, the film has few pretensions, which make it easy on the derriere. Poor Bae Doo-na gets one of the stranger film roles in film history, as a pickpocket who apparently knows she must LOVE the hero even before she KNOWS the hero, and creates all the necessary Korean histrionics along the way (as well as almost bearing more physical brutality than the hero!) while our glowering protagonist poses with a series of unlit cigarettes in his mouth (and which only one person will ever be allowed to light, care to guess who?). The SPEED and TAKING OF PELHAM allusions are apt, as are slight nods to MONEY TRAIN (the hero's boss does his best crazy Robert Blake impersonation) and DIE HARD (or UNDER SIEGE 2 if you'd rather, since it's so blatantly name-checked on the U.S. package), but overall it's a victim of it's own weak (and often downright ridiculous) logic and begs a few too many questions. The lovely Bae Doo-na plays one of the most strangely motivated characters I've ever seen in a motion picture. Production wise, though, it's delivers the goods, with slick production values all the way, with some nicely handled chase and fight scenes. Turns out, if I read the docu-stuff on the Korean 2-disc set correctly, that the Korean subway trains don't even look as hi-tech as they do here, and the ones in the film were almost entirely CG apart from the sets for close-ups! Columbia Tri-Star's sleeve is highly reminiscent of the art for TRANSPORTER and, not entirely unexpectedly, substitutes a generic Asian face for that of star Kim Seok-hoon. I give it a 4.

You don't get me containing my excitement too much for Hong Kong/Japanese/Korean action films. I see a name like John Woo, Chow Yun-Fat or Takeshi Kitano on a movie poster and I break into hives with anticipation. What makes these foreign films better or more appealing than their American counterparts you ask? Well, first and foremost is the style. Our friends from the East have a knack for action sequences. Check out the gunplay in films like Hard Boiled and Shiri and see their influences in the West with films like Face/Off and Heat.

So when the creators of Shiri reunited for a film about a cop on the trail of a madman who has taken over a speeding train, my heart began to pump uncontrollably and pestered my local DVD supplier continually for updates as to the film's North American Release.

The film I am referring is Tube. Directed by first timer Baek Woon-Hak and starring a multitude of hyphenated names that you wouldn't recognize, the movie was about a former assassin for the government that takes over a subway train to persuade his former boss and now mortal enemy to sacrifice his life for the lives of the innocents on board.

Putting a crink in the plans is a rogue cop who has been on the killers trail for many years, and who too is looking for payback for the death of his wife and the loss of a finger in an abbreviated altercation that took place some time in the past.

As demands are made and peaceful solutions examined, people are shot, ambushes are ordered and rail cars are blown up. Everything we would expect from a film of this genre.

It's too bad it doesn't work.

While watching Tube I wondered if the Director and Producers were sitting around one weekend watching American action films and tried to copy what they thought were the best parts from each. The premise is stripped from Under Siege 2 (and if you ever copy a Steven Segal film, you need your head checked), the opening sequence rips of Heat, an attempted rescue on the train was done better in Speed and even films like Apollo 13 and Stallone's Daylight look to have had their scenes stolen directly from the original screenplays.

But stealing from big budget films wasn't the only once noticeable Americanization of the film. Speeches are given when the characters should be acting or reacting to their situations and flashbacks are thrown in to stretch the running time. The soundtrack was overwhelming as is Hans Zimmer was vacationing in Tokyo and had nothing better to do than provide a repeating beat that would bound out of my subwoofer every time we see the train speeding down the track. Even the comic relief in the character of a thug that is handcuffed in one of the rail cars was straight from a Bruckheimer brainstorm. Whoa's me!

My excitement over the films release was quashed like a lake being thrown on a campfire. Everything that made these foreign films unique and pulse pounding was lost to what I can only assume was an attempt to puncture a hole in the lucrative North American video market. I could have cared less about the characters, I felt no attachment to the emotional attachment between the various couples and if you are just going to throw mindless action at me, well then, I hate to say it but give me a Michael Bay film. At least then I know what to expect and don't feel robbed of an afternoon.

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