Whatever happened to “Can’t we all just get along?” There’s lots of double crossing (even in the back story) and suffice it to say that by the end it’s a veritable battle royal on a cliff between four people all with an axe to grind.

He falls into hard times and to pay off a gambling debt (tired plot device #1 of many) he agrees to swim drugs across from Japan to Korea. Without giving too much of the “plot” away…hehehehe…Choen-soo (played by the dashing, sometimes even likeable KIM Kang-woo) is a swimming coach, a job incidental to the plot…not that we ever see him coaching…all we see him do is gamble and get into trouble. I mean I knew there’d be a happy ending for the main couple, but director YUN Jogn-seok pulled one over on me. A part of me was saying, “This is such crap” while another part was saying, “Man, these are pretty people!” The only twist I didn’t predict was the very end. There are plots and plot twists so convoluted and strained that at one point I couldn’t keep up.

There are good guys who we root for (even though the main character isn’t that sympathetic…simply handsome with a swimmer’s build) and bad guys who almost chew the scenery frothing at the mouth. So just know up front there’s no new ground covered here cinematically, lie say in the movie Shiri or even Nowhere to Hide. Hollywood is the undisputed king of the action movie.

Suffice it to say this is not one of those films Americans watching will see anything new from. Thanks to her efforts I was able to watch Marine Boy, a guilty pleasure of an action movie. Today’s film came to me through the generous efforts of a colleague who recently went to Korea and so admirably trekked across Seoul to a specific book store called Seoul Selection (Hank’s Book store from the outside) with a list of films I had E-mailed her.

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