Harbin was a movie that took me on a journey in one particular sense: it starts off with a spectacular and especially gnarly, grisly insurgent-battle set piece, so pungent with blood and viscera and gore on a level that means to shock you with its brutality; this is followed by our flawed but stalwart hero Ahn Jung-Geun (don't worry you will be reminded of his name by the scarred Japanese antagonist as dozen times letting go the Japanese lieutenant for the whole "we can't keep going down this dark path" reasoning that ultimately leads to part of his troops being massacred; this then leads to... a reprimand but then he is back in good graces for some reason as the main plot to take out a Japanese Prime Minister; then it is a little dull as it goes into major exposition-plot mode and there are long shots of landscapes and characters that are fairly thin (and I had that worry of "oh this is getting too dry and dull)...
Then a funny thing happens: the story takes a suspenseful turn around the halfway mark (actual storytelling is a way where it's being *shown* instead of told as our hero turns his head on a train and book revelation): a major character is a mole in the Korean operation, and the unfolding of how this came to be - in what should be a stock approach with a black and white tinted flashback but it manages to be directed so that we are locked in with the performances and tension that this brings - is what brought me back around to liking the film again. It's never a poorly made film, on the contrary the director Woo Min-Ho has a sharp eye for detail and artistry, from the opening shot of the lone man on the ice to those ragged and harrowing battle shots, and then how we always know what is happening during the attacks or that one big whoops of an explosion that mucks up the plot for the Koreans.
If there's any overriding issue though it's that the main character of Ahn is just not that compelling, through no fault of Hyun Bin, simply that it's most interesting to see his best intentions turned sour from his comrades, but then this doesn't figure much into the rest of the story and he becomes more of a story device than anything else. Luckily the supporting cast pick up the slack, especially Park Hoo, Jo Woo Jin and, nearly unrecognizable from his various Kdrama appearances I'm used to seeing, Lee Dong-Wook (our boy has facial hair for once), and one does get more involved with the plot the more the stakes get turned up in the second half. It's worth seeing, though perhaps if you want a dark and gloomy wartime espionage epic where the ambition really meets the artistry go watch or watch again Age of Shadows instead.
