“Steel Rain 2: Summit” Theatrical Poster
Director: Yang Woo-Seok
Cast: Jung Woo-Sung, Kwak Do-Won, Yoo Yeon-Seok, Shin Jung-Keun, Kim Wang-Do, Ryu Soo-Young, Angus Macfadyen, John D. Michaels, Yook Hyo-Myung
Running Time: 131 min.
By Paul Bramhall
In 2017 director Yang Woo-seok helmed Steel Rain, an adaptation of his own web comic of the same name that saw Jung Woo-sung and Kwak Do-won thrown together from opposing sides of the Korean peninsula in an attempt to prevent a nuclear war. 3 years later and Woo-seok is back with Steel Rain 2: Summit, a sequel which also features Woo-sung and Do-won, and once more they’re involved in a tale that involves the threat of nuclear war and the measures that must be taken to prevent it. For those who have seen Steel Rain, the elephant in the room will of course be how exactly Woo-sung and Do-won have been brought back together, and the answer comes in the form of them playing completely different characters than they were in the original.
This isn’t the first time for a director to bring back the same cast members from the original for a thematic sequel. Director Kang Woo-seok’s bringing back of Sol Kyung-gu for 2005’s Another Public Enemy, playing a distinctly different character than he did in 2002’s Public Enemy, immediately springs to mind. Here Woo-seok maintains the theme of Steel Rain, but crafts a decidedly different take on the same material. Whereas last time Woo-sung was a North Korean agent and Do-won was the Foreign Affairs Chief for South Korea, here the actors get a chance to switch their geographical allegiances, with Woo-sung playing the President of South Korea, and Do-won a ruthless North Korean military general.
The plot for the sequel revolves around the summit alluded to in the title, a planned meeting between the leaders of the North, South, and the U.S. which has the goal of securing denuclearisation in the region and maybe even an official end to the Korean War. The sheer amount of political manoeuvring to ensure the summit goes ahead makes what’s best described as a talky political thriller during the first act, as the 3 leaders eventually come together in the summits North Korean host town of Wonsan with tensions already riding high. It’s while there that they find themselves in the cross hairs of an attempted coup d’état by Do-won and his military unit, which sees them abducted and held as hostages on a North Korean nuclear submarine.
Steel Rain 2: Summit is likely to be a movie that blindsides many audiences. With an opening scene that contains a pair of characters talking in unintelligible English (I challenge anyone to understand what’s being said without subtitles) and a bombardment of onscreen text detailing characters names along with their job titles, all indications point to a heavy handed and serious affair. The underlying nationalism that ran through the original is also present and accounted for here, with Japanese right-wing extremists and Chinese interests in the mix, plus a significant plot point revolves around a group of disputed islets in the Sea of Japan (which Korea refer to as Dokdo, and Japan refer to as Takeshima).
These early dialogue heavy scenes though prove not be a tone setter for the rest of the epic 130-minute runtime. Rather, Woo-seok has opted to create something akin to a satirical black comedy. Joining Woo-sung (Beasts Clawing at Straws, Asura: City of Madness) as part of the abducted trio is Yoo Yeon-seok (A Werewolf Boy, Architecture 101) as the North Korean leader, and Angus Macfadyen (Pound of Flesh, Warriors of Virtue) as the President of the United States. Thrown together in a confined room once on the submarine, the trios’ efforts to get along frequently descend into squabbles and misunderstandings. Despite the seriousness of everything, Woo-seok seamlessly blends scenes involving toilet humour, and at its most hilarious, the realisation that Yeon-seok’s North Korean leader speaks better English that Woo-sung’s South Korean President sees the former translating for the latter when speaking to Macfadyen.
Macfadyen proves to be an entertaining scene stealer as the U.S. President (hilariously named President Smoot), blatantly modelled after Donald Trump right down to the red tie, demands for Coke, and stilted self-congratulatory musings. It seems bizarre that in a plot with so much on the line, one of the highlights consists of watching the leaders of the U.S. and North Korea getting into a yelling match that consists of who can shout “F*ck you!” at each other the loudest, but Steel Rain 2: Summit is that movie. The absurdity of it all works in the tones favour, since not once do any of the actors give away that they’re in on the joke, instead playing their roles with poker faced sincerity.
Once you attune to what Woo-seok is going for with his sequel it becomes an entertaining ride, and the decision to go in a completely different direction than the original is to be applauded, resulting in a production that’s actually superior to its predecessor in almost every way. The stakes are ramped up once it’s revealed a super typhoon is moving in (which takes the title’s name of ‘Steel Rain’) which could throw off Do-wan’s nefarious plans to put North Korea on the map with a nuclear strike. It’s been a while since we’ve seen submarine action in a Korean movie, and the last time also involved Woo-sung in 1999’s Phantom the Submarine. Thankfully technological advances mean that underwater action today can be crafted in a way which is much more thrilling than anything we saw over 20 years earlier.
With both divided factions in the submarine itself fighting each other, and the fact that a pair of Japanese subs are deployed to take out what they perceive as a threat from North Korea, the finale throws together torpedoes, traitors, and typhoons to craft a thrilling underwater face off that doesn’t outstay its welcome. Of course the whole concept of Woo-seok’s follow-up is ironically already dated just a couple of years after its release. Both presidents who were responsible for placing engagement with North Korea on the top of their respective agendas – Moon Jae-in for South Korea and Donald Trump for the U.S. – have now stepped down. In South Korea Yoon Suk-yeol was sworn in as the new president in 2022 and has taken a much more hard-line approach to North Korea, going so far as to express a willingness for pre-emptive strikes, whereas in the U.S. Joe Biden became president in 2021, pushing North Korea well into the background.
From this perspective Steel Rain 2: Summit is an admittedly very recent time capsule of an optimistic, but at the same time not entirely out of reach, view of how the whole engagement between the South, North, and U.S. could have ended up playing out, just minus the coup d’état and any hostage taking. South Korean cinema has always to some degree reflected the relationship status with its Northern neighbours, from the patriotic revisionism of the Park Geun-hye era (2013 – 2017), to the expressions of hope under Moon Jae-in (2017 – 2022). It’ll be interesting to see what kind of cinematic output we get that deals with North Korea during Yoon Suk-yeol’s turn in office, but for now it’s too early to tell.
Whereas the pairing of Jung Woo-sung and Kwak Do-won didn’t quite hit the intended mark in the original Steel Rain, here both are given characters that offer up much more to work with, surrounded by a broader cast who all play off each other to entertaining effect. Interestingly Yang Woo-seok remains an elusive director, with Steel Rain 2: Summit being only his 3rd feature after his critically acclaimed debut with The Attorney in 2013. While Steel Rain admittedly made me think his debut was a fluke, with the sequel his offbeat blending off satire, action, and bombast makes me believe he has the potential to be perhaps a wittier version of Park Hoon-jung. Time will tell, but for those who saw the original and were left underwhelmed by the confused direction and misplaced comedy, Steel Rain 2: Summit shows a director who’s learnt to addressed both, and best of all, he’s done it in a way that likely nobody was expecting.
Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 7/10
