The Thieves: Big Box Office Action in the East

It began with Shiri, the sexy South Korean sleeper that broke box-office records in 1999. This was when South Korea bucked the universal tendency to rely upon Hollywood to satisfy big budget action tastes.

This film industry south of the 38^th Parallel now aimed to provide its domestic audience with the blockbuster sustenance they required. Five years later records were again smashed, this time by the civil war epic Brotherhood (Taegukgi), a film whose budget, like Shiri’s, fed from Korea’s great economic boom of the 90s. Then when Oldboy won the 2004 Grand Prix in Cannes, mainstream international audiences finally woke up to a blossoming film industry in the East to rival Hong Kong’s early 90s glory. Now GFF hosts the country's most recent success, and second highest all time earner, The Thieves.

Here we have a heist movie that's big, bad and stupid enough to rival Hollywood, and it’s all glorious fun. Director Choi Dong-hun may tire of comparisons to Ocean’s Eleven, but for much of its running time The Thieves looks and sounds very much like Soderbergh’s crime caper, even down to its use of hipster lounge music. But where the American director tied his narrative neatly, Choi continually elevates the action in a seemingly endless spiral of backstabbing bloodshed. The film can be said to follow a Die Hard trajectory comparable to the wonderful Korean thriller The Yellow Sea. The Thieves continually changes gear, always upwards, moving ever faster with its expertly choreographed, slickly cut and glossed-up style.

What separates it from the nation's other hits is that it has aspirations beyond the South Korean peninsula. Its inclinations to invade territories other than its own are flaunted through the casting of Hong Kong old guard Simon Yam and Malaysian songstress Angelica Lee, making it a truly Pan-Asian line-up. With domestic productions presently accounting for almost 60% of movies released in South Korea, its is obviously a vibrant film industry. The noticeable change will come, however, when they challenge Western film, not on their own terrain but at Western box offices. This might occur once we’re finally comfortable making heroes of those who don’t look or sound as we do.

With Oldboy’s Park Chan-wook releasing his English language debut Stoker, which played at GFF this year, and Kim Ji-woon directing none other than Arnie in The Last Stand (have we come full circle?), this is an interesting time for a film industry which is now cross pollinating others in the same way that it was once was pollinated. Currently, it seems, they're giving us far more than they received.