Haeundae

Having seen Korea’s first ever disaster movie “Haeundae”, you could be forgiven for thinking that the word means “pile of garbage ”. In fact, it’s the name of a beach resort in Busan that the film cheerfully submerges, much to our relief, after more than an hour of poor soap opera and even poorer comedy.

The movie is one of the most commercially successful in Korea’s film history, released onto 869 screens nationwide and boasting two million admissions in its first five days. For all that, it may be the worst and most inept movie I have ever seen. And given that I saw the new Transformers movie a couple of months ago, that’s no cause for pride. “Haeundai” has been marketed in Korea with fervent calls to patriotism, along the lines of: “it may not be as slick as American movies but it IS Korean”. Movies marketed in this way rarely have other qualities to be measured by.

Director Yoon Je-gyun thinks that a mega tsunami is the stuff of third-rate comedy mixed with painfully-over-the-top melodrama. That’s not surprising. In Korea he is known as a director of unsophisticated comedy. For me the biggest surprise is why anyone would give someone so inept US$13 million to make a movie based on his own appalling script.

In form it copies the US disaster movies such as “The Poseidon Adventure”, Towering Inferno” and “Earthquake”. For the first two thirds of its length we are introduced to a group of poorly written, over acted, and extremely irritating characters that make us pray the tsunami will come soon.

At first, you can be forgiven for thinking you’ve walked into the wrong cinema to see “The Perfect Storm”. It’s December 2004. A deep-sea trawler is caught in heaving seas. A man is trapped under heavy equipment. A helicopter comes to life the crew off. As the 2004 tsunami approaches, the noble trapped man tells the younger Choi Man-shik (Seol Gyeong-gu) to leave him behind, but to promise him that he’ll look after his daughter. The melodrama has commenced.

Cut to August 2009. Choi, who has a young son (Cheon Bo-geun), is still keeping an eye on the dead man’s daughter Gang Yeon-heui (Ha Ji-weon), with whom he is in love. She runs a small seaside fish eatery, and seemingly can’t stop getting on the wrong side of his stereotypical nasty mother. He’s too tongue-tied to make his feelings known.

Choi’s younger brother Hyeong-shik (Lee Min-gi) is a lifeguard who rescues a rich college girl (Gang Ye-weon) after she has fallen off a boat into the sea. He accidentally beats her face several times while doing so. She bites his lip in revenge. It’s an awful “meet cute”, made even more awful by the cheap comedy characterisation of both her and her friends.

The relationship gets evenworse as Yoon then steals the sado-masochistic relationship angle from “My Sassy Girl” to develop their story. Forget about the psychology. Yoon’s script does not have an inkling of credible human psychology.

Among the rest of the cast, there’s another loser buffoon character, whose name I don’t remember and don’t even want to remember. There’s Choi’s uncle (Song Jae-ho) who is a wealthy property developer, and wants to buy out the good honest citizens. There’s a marine geologist Kim Hwi (Park Jung-hun), who is sounding out constant warnings that a mega tsunami is on the way. Of course, no one is listening, including Kim’s career oriented ex-wife, Lee Yu-jin (Eom Jeong-hwa). She’s in town for a business event, bringing his young daughter, who does not even know he is her father.

Cliches run thick and fast, until eventually, thank God, the tsunami arrives.

Download link :

Part 1 | Part 2 | Part 3 | Part 4 | Part 5