westsideschl
Lots of stereotypes perpetuated (bad guys for all of the following): Americans, Arabs; North & South Koreans; Germans. Whatever image you have for each of those groups - don't bother to alter it. Poorly written (difficult to follow) with lots of highly improbable events like different groups from the above all happening to show up at the same obscure spot at the same time; lots of dubious, if not down right dumb decision making (credulity stretching) by members of all those groups just to maintain 90 minutes of film activity. Usual fight scenes and shoot outs that make you go - pleeease, can't you come up with anything creative that hasn't been done in two thousand movies already. Example of an improbable, done before: Woman (with heavy backpack) falls from rooftop and at last second grabs gutter by fingertips with no more effort than if she were polishing her nails. Poorly edited resulting in a jump around, disjointed film. English as second language for most of the actors along with poor enunciation and audio level control (outside of subtitles for the Korean) makes most of the film (80%) difficult/impossible to listen to. I offer a similar, and much better, Korean movie, "Commitment" as a substitute.
Alexander Vyatkin
Be prepared to invest sufficient attention into an arduous story of North- and South-Korean secret service affairs. Mostly North-Korean, because they are the main characters of the story."Chekism" (see Wikipedia for definition), triggered in North Korea by the USSR intrusion, is a sort of state-mediated robbery and state-provided terrorism in favor of Pharaoh's family and a narrow circle of his guards and buddies. Having being deprived of usual and legal economical levers, chekist state can only evolve through criminal activities of any kind. Consequently, all people, engaged in these activities, are criminals by definition - by the very fact of their participation, whether it is conscious or not. Nature doesn't care if something happens consciously or not, it just records the instances. The resulting outcome is equitable on a large time scale: those, who participate in crime, have no further chances to participate in evolution. This simple (though not evident) law of nature is not declared explicitly, but in many South-Korean films it's pronounced rather distinctly. And this is what makes them always sensible, yet often unexpected.
mglee1111
Being away from Korea at the moment, I only caught this film a few days ago. I'm quite a fan of 'serious' spy films like The Ipcress File or the more recent adaptation of Tinker, Tailor, Solider, Spy, so I decided to give this rather sombre-looking film a watch. For me, personally, there was almost nothing to dislike before I started watching; having seen Shiri, the first Korean spy-action film, as a kid, I was very excited about Han Seok-kyu returning to a more gritty role of an experienced Cold Warrior intelligence officer. Han mainly plays the role to be reminiscent of his previous appearance in Eye for an Eye (눈 에는 눈, 이 에는 이), wherein he portrays a veteran somewhat disillusioned with the ideals and organisation he fights for, but still employing his keen sense against his opponents. While not as off-the-rails as his character Baek Seong-chan in Eye for an Eye, Han's new-found propensity to add a little frenzy to the emotional mix added suspense to the unfolding plot.At the very basics, The Berlin File revolves around a botched arms deal between rogue state and non-state actors, whose ripple effects bring in the wider circle of the international intelligence community. Amidst the intrigue is the more personal relationships between the spies themselves, whether between those on the same side, or beyond ideological borders. To be honest, I found the overall story to be entertaining, but as others point out, somewhat convoluted for the fairly frenetic pace of the action and movements. It was quite clear that the film-makers were going for a kind of John le Carre flavour to the distinctly Korean mix of action and drama, even going so far as to actually use a copy of his novel The Spy Who Came in from the Cold as a prop in a scene (a German copy, which was a nice touch). Ha Jeong-woo and Ryu Seung-beom were ideal as North Korean fixers, the former having previously played a stoic action-based North Korean in the brutal 2010 film The Yellow Sea. Their tale of corrupted brotherhood might even have been an allegory of generational changes in the DPRK, just as Han Seok- kyu's conflicts with his own organisation might just symbolise such tumult in South Korea.Something that I did find rather disappointing was the limited role that Jeon Ji-hyeon, a decent actress in her own right, played in the story. I admit, I haven'이 seen most of her films, but in those that I am familiar with, she is known for her own brand of strong, spunky femininity, which allowed her to play the lead across a variety of genres. I wasn'이 so keen that in The Berlin File, she was reduced to a glorified damsel-in- distress, meekly awaiting her man to rescue her. Not that I was expecting her to bust out the wire-action as in her previous film The Thieves, which dazzled with glamour and wit as opposed to this deliberately dour and heavy-set piece, but I did want her to be given more initiative in how her character was presented. Nonetheless, Jeon Ji-hyeon does well to fulfil the position of an understated heroine.Furthermore, while trying to avoid spoilers as much as possible, I can'이 say I cared much for the blunt and unrelenting use of action scenes toward the end, albeit only for a sequence of, say, 10 minutes or so. If John le Carre and other 'hard' spy fiction wants to tell us anything, it's that the real world of espionage is far-flung from the glitzy fantasy landscape of James Bond, and even the action-fuelled chaos of the Bourne series. The real world of intelligence, apparently, is more painstaking paperwork and dead drops, than shoot-outs and gadgets. The first half of The Berlin File pays faithful homage to the slow and uneasy atmosphere of Western works with similar premise, while ratcheting up the action factor towards the end, probably, to appeal to a wider audience. Don'이 get me wrong, it's reasonably well done and much less gratuitous than otherwise might have been (looking at you, IRIS). My only gripe, as perhaps befitting a le Carre fan, is that it wasn'이 as tedious as it should have been!All in all, I think that a film is a decent one when the worst that can be said about it is that it's a "step forward for the Korean film industry", while the best praise for it puts it up there along with the global standard. And globally appealing it is too, partly due to the script supervision of an American film-maker that made the English and German dialogue less inept than Korean films in the past have allowed. I certainly hope to see The Berlin File gather at least some recognition outside of Korea, and maybe even to see more of its kind in the future.
