Amidst the fast car chases through, what looked like, a digitally-remade Seoul in the 80s, the nostalgic 80s throwback via style or music or pop culture reference, the charm of its wonderful cast, and all the swagger and bravado of these characters, ‘Seoul Vibe’ also seems to hint or imply at some level of social commentary that I’m not privy to, as I’m not that versed in Korean history.
‘Seoul Vibe’ is a hyper-real, highly stylized action film with a lot of elements of a caper or heist movie. Director Moon Hyung-sung seems more focused on celebrating the 80s nostalgia and the frenetic energy of its story than it is in digging into his character’s inner being. Things are happening so fast and without much of a grounded narrative set-up that a lot of plot points just passed me by.
Set during the 1988 Seoul Olympic Games, ‘Seoul Vibe’ follows an ex-convict, Dong-wook (Yoo Ah In), who returns to Seoul after a stint in Saudi Arabia driving for an arms dealer. He’s an excellent race car driver with dreams of racing in the US but his return to South Korea returns him to his troubled past. He discovers that his old neighborhood had been demolished in preparation for the Olympics. From the get-go, we know that Dong-wook and his team are people on the fringes of society and people the government had forgotten.
This social commentary just remains under the surface but is never fully explored. Instead, we are quickly thrust into the plot of the movie. Upon his arrival, a prosecutor (Oh Jung-se) is ready to slap Dong-wook and his friends with arrests if they don’t cooperate and go undercover to gather intel on Chairwoman Kang In-sook (Moon So-ri), a woman involved in drugs and corruption in the highest levels of government.
We don’t know much about Dong-wook except what is said nor how deep his relationships with his friends are but the story goes straight into the caper/heist aspect of the film and through it we see a version of Seoul that is riddled with corruption that has left the underprivileged struggling while being in enamored with American capitalist tendencies (McDonald’s, American hiphop, and American television shows like ‘Knight Rider’).
The story is quite thin as it is more focused on the heist itself, the style, and the thrills and laughs that the film has to offer. Yoo Ah In is joined by an equally charming cast that includes Ong Seong-wu, who plays his mechanic and engineer; Lee Kyu-hyung, who plays his friend who knows the streets of Seoul; Park Ju-hyun, who plays his sister, who is a leader of an all-woman bike gang; and Go Kyung-pyo, a DJ. Their relationships are never really fully explored but you can see that the chemistry of this group is so tight that you can imagine the antics these characters must’ve gone through in their youths.
A lot of the narrative elements of ‘Seoul Vibe’ are just hinted at or implied and you just have to ride along and not question too much or you’ll miss out on all of the fun. I easily let go of the need to understand why this was all happening and just enjoyed the hows and the whats of it all. I relished in the film’s indulgences. Everything is hyper-real, all the actors hamming it up that it creates a tone and atmosphere where you just take it as it is and have fun with it.
It wasn’t after the movie that I did some digging and discovered that 1988 was an important year for South Korea’s history as the country was shifting from a military rule to a democratic one after several huge protests were staged a year before.
While it is easy to watch ‘Seoul Vibe’ as a thin-narrative of a group of outsiders getting a chance to go legitimate by helping the government, there’s a lot more in the way the setting and the references that gives me the impression it has a lot more to say than “just have fun.”
It’s only after reading just a bit of history that I realised that, while ‘Seoul Vibe’ is thin on plot, it is loaded with so much historical context. The film is not just some crazy, stylized action film, but also an attack on corrupt governments that have made life so difficult for some that they have to resort to a life of crime to survive. The irony, in the film, is that these same criminals are now being tasked by a hidden arm of the government to try and bring down the corrupt elements within.
The closest thing to an internal struggle for Dong-wook is the question of whether any of this means anything to him? Because, really, what has the country done for him? It is an interesting question that is posed but never really answered directly.
I’m sure there’s a lot more in ‘Seoul Vibe’ just underneath the layers that I might uncover in the future once I know more about Korea’s history but I still enjoyed it for its crazy filmmaking and its unapologetic love for that era. Yoo Ah In and the rest of the cast are having a blast playing these characters and it is infectious.
My Rating:
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Seoul Vibe premieres on Netflix this Friday, August 26.
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