Take Point | aka PMC: Private Military Company (2018) Review

“Take Point” Theatrical Poster

Director: Kim Byung-Woo
Cast: Ha Jung-Woo, Lee Sun-Kyun, Jennifer Ehle, Kevin Durand, Malik Yoba, Spencer Daniels, Shin Hyun-Bin, Ahn Seong-Bong, Kim Sun-Hyuk
Running Time: 124 min.

By Paul Bramhall

The Korean film industry has an interesting relationship with the action genre. A mainstay of the countries cinematic output for a long time, it was ultimately an action movie which brought Korean cinema to international attention with 1999’s Shiri. Skips forward 20 years, and the dynamic has changed considerably. Korea consistently cranks out movies containing some of the most innovatively bone crunching action scenes around, however rarely do the productions that such scenes appear in brand themselves as action. Instead, the art of action has become an integral part of a wide range of genres – thrillers, crime, gangster flicks, and police procedurals to name a few.

So where does that leave the action genre itself? There have been a few titles which have fearlessly branded themselves as action movies – in 2006 Ryoo Seung-wan unleashed City of Violence, a stylish but poorly paced fight flick, and in 2013 Won Shin-yun gave us The Suspect, a well-staged action spectacle undone by overly eager editing. In short, it’s a genre that’s struggled to be what it says on the tin, too frequently undone by overly bloated plots, or people in post-production who don’t understand that how action is shot is just as important as how it’s performed. With that being said, we still seem to get a movie out of Korea every few years that proudly labels itself as an action flick, and the latest of those is Take Point.

The third movie from director Kim Byeong-woo, Take Point reunites him with leading man Ha Jung-woo, who anchored his sophomore feature The Terror Live in 2013. The opening credits lay out an intriguing premise through a mix of news clips and phone calls, as we learn that the year is 2024, and the U.S. economy has been plunged into chaos. The cause, as it turns out, began with the U.S. lifting the sanctions off North Korea after a successful meeting between the two countries leaders. Without the political restrictions, North Korea partnered with its economic juggernaut of a neighbour, China, and their combined manufacturing industries come to supply most of the world’s economies, leaving the U.S. trailing behind. Unwilling to leave things as they stand and with an election on the horizon, the U.S. president orders the CIA to orchestrate a change to the North Korean regime, and he doesn’t care how they do it.

It’s a smart premise, and one that plugs directly into current fears on the Korean peninsula, as the power-plays of both the U.S. and China often find South Korea in the crosshairs due to circumstance. As smart as it may be though, as soon as the credits stop rolling, it becomes clear that Take Point is more likely to be described as a glorified action B-movie than it is an intelligent action flick. Taking a leaf from the likes of The Dirty Dozen and Eastern Condors, a cynical CIA operative played by Jennifer Ehle (Zero Dark Thirty, Fifty Shades of Grey) enlists an off-the-radar black-ops unit comprising of illegal aliens residing in the U.S.. With the promise of citizenship as a reward, the crew gather in a sprawling underground bunker that resides between the two Korea’s, where a key meeting will take place between both countries. Their job? Kidnap an important North Korean General, and bring him to the South. Of course, things don’t go to plan.

Led by an ex-paratrooper played by Ha Jung-woo (The Handmaiden, Assassination), the rest of the group comprises of various nationalities, all of which means that for the majority of its runtime, Take Point plays out in English. Thankfully we’re a world away from the foreign ‘talent’ that used to populate HK flicks of old, instead featuring a cast with names like Kevin Durand (Legion, Resident Evil: Retribution) and Malik Yoba (Cool Runnings, Cop Land). Bizarrely, director Byeong-woo has decided to lumber them with a variety of dodgy accents. Despite this though, they’re still more comprehensible than Jung-woo. Jung-woo is one of Korea’s brightest acting talents, and while he does an amicable job, the sheer number of lines he has to get through in his non-native tongue inevitably leads to instances of needing to rely on the subtitles.

Almost identical to Steel Rain which was released the year prior, the plot device of North Korea’s Supreme Leader (amusingly referred to here as ‘King’) showing up where he’s not supposed to is used to crank up the tension, and also like in that movie, he ends up critically injured and in the hands of the South. Onscreen this all plays out via a lot of gratuitous gunfire, with Jung-woo and his crew heavily outnumbered, in a series of entertaining set-pieces which incorporate a number of high impact first-person shots. Much like The Terror Live was restricted to a studio, almost all of Take Point is restricted to the confines of the underground bunker, indicating that director Byeong-woo is a fan of one-location scenarios (and if you also consider Tunnel, Jung-woo is becoming the go-to actor for featuring in them).

For the most part it works, however Byeong-woo’s obvious fondness of ‘Boy’s Own’ style adventures leads to some painfully clichéd scenes. Jung-woo’s smoking habit comes across as more to do with looking cool than it does a genuine character trait, and if you think that’s bad wait until he whips out his whiskey hip flask as they prepare to start the mission. At its worst, when the Mexican member of the team is marked as the guy who’ll bust down the doors and secure the Take Point, we have to sit through Jung-woo giving him a stirring speech about how soon he’ll be able to open that farm he’s been dreaming of, and live a peaceful life with his family. As expected, said character bites the dust a few minutes later.

Thankfully Lee Sun-kyun (Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage, A Hard Day) is on hand as a member of the North Korean entourage that becomes dependant on Sung-woo to survive, and also provides an opportunity for them both to converse in Korean, offering a welcome refrain. It’s when a member of Jung-woo’s team double crosses them that provides a pivotal moment in Take Point’s structure, as after a well-staged shoot-out that displays some great camerawork, Jung-woo finds himself incapacitated and unable to leave the room he’s in. Thanks to the technology available, involving plenty of monitors and hi-tech looking devices, he can still communicate with the rest of the team, however Byeong-soo inexplicably takes the decision to keep the audience in the room with Jung-woo as well. What this means for us is that, for almost half the movie, we’re essentially watching a series of video calls.

Sure, they may be video calls with people running around corridors firing big guns, but at the end of the day, they’re still video calls. The format unfortunately removes some of the impact we should probably be feeling to what unfolds, instead acting to remove the sense of immediacy from the action. As the majority of Jung-woo’s team lack any kind of real characterisation, they also become largely interchangeable. It often feels like the most meaningful time we spend with them is when we see the red cross get stamped across their image on a large monitor, signifying they’ve been killed off. All of this culminates to create an experience where it’s difficult to connect with the blatant crisis at hand. The stakes are sky high, but really, we just want Jung-woo to complete his video call and move onto the next one.

Byeong-woo seems to realise that, and decides to overcompensate with the finale, which ditches the bunker setting and becomes a bombastic sky-diving spectacle. Let’s have the conversation – sky-diving finales are risky. Released in a year when Tom Cruise performed a HALO jump in Mission: Impossible – Fallout (which wasn’t even the finale!), and following on from the likes of Jackie Chan’s own sky-diving finale in 2012’s CZ12, if you’re going to do one, it has to be spectacular. That starts with being done for real, which Take Point’s clearly isn’t, even if the green screen work is stellar. However the real crime here is that the pacing of it is off, and the attempt to connect it to an earlier flashback sequence fails to resonate. In short, it would have been better if they’d stayed in the bunker.

Despite these criticisms, with the right expectations Take Point is a decent enough action flick. What it could really have benefitted from, is spending less time on trying to convince us it’s a big blockbuster, and more time on embracing its B-movie roots. Wedged between Ha Jung-woo’s performance in Park Chan-wook’s The Handmaiden, and Lee Sun-kyun’s performance in Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite, if nothing else, it’s an opportunity to see both actors have some fun in an unpretentious slice of mindless action cinema.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5/10