Silmido

This macho weepie presents itself as a 'now it can be told' drama (it's based on recently declassified files), but hardly a frame of it feels close to any verifiable reality. In the winter of 1968 the South Korean dictator Park and the Korean CIA form an elite guerilla squad to infiltrate North Korea and assassinate Kim Il-Sung. The men chosen for the mission are not soldiers but Death Row convicts; their training takes place in total secrecy on Silmido ('Silmi Island') under the command of Lt Kim (Ahn) and Sgt Jo (Hur). The conscripts include Kang (Sol), driven to crime by the social ostracism he suffered after his father defected to the north. Three years of boot camp clichés later, the mission is aborted and the army is ordered to terminate the squad members. But the men (all now highly motivated patriots) escape, hijack a bus and head for Seoul. In short, a variation on The Dirty Dozen pumped up with nationalist rhetoric and sentiment. Koreans flocked (10 million admissions), but it's hard to imagine anyone else loving it.