Finally saw this on the weekend.
What wasted potential.
Started out with a very fascinating look at pre-war life in Seoul - who would ever dream what life would be like in Korea away from the firing line? Really well done stuff here. Then the two main characters - John Wayne and his younger brother Gym Sock. The initial combat scenes are good. Actually, all the CGI is great with the exception of the air support scenes later in the film, which are freakishly bad and look like they were spliced in using MicroSoft Paint.
But the initial scenes of fighting are quite well executed - again, what film has ever shown Korean soldiers in anything but a hopelessly minor role? They are bloody and frightening and chaotic - my favourite passing moment of the entire film is the new recruit firing his M-1 Garand into his buddy's side.
There's the usual half-assed romantic subplot, of course, with some girl named Bruised Knee or Aged Ligament or Young Shin or something vaguely anatomically English. It doesn't matter because she has all the wit and personality of Britney Spears.
The movie has a ridiculous (Asian?) tendency to disintegrate into fistfights. And considering Gym Sock was a malnourished college student and John Wayne was a shoeshine boy, they seem to know a lot of Jiu Jitsu and Karate and Kung Fu moves; John Wayne takes on 3 or 4 MPs on induction day and holds his own. Is this remotely possible? And throughout the movie, when its time for a really important confrontation, these dudes throw down their perfectly good semi-automatic weapons and start grappling like pre-teen girls asked to duke it out for Hannah Montana tickets.
The movie ends at least three different times, and then tacks on a completely unnecessary closing. I mean, we see Gym Sock in the very first scene as a grandfather, do we really need a final scene showing him coming home from the war? I mean, duh, we know he lived through it.
Oh, for added comic effect, choose the English dubbed version on your DVD. Some inadvertent howlers all the way through as they try to put Korean into some sort of English mil-speak. John Wayne defects (after a series of extremely unlikely coincidences put him and his brother, independent of each other, at the address of his fiancee just at the exact moment in time she is arrested by the anti-Communist faction of the government) and joins something called Flag Squad, where his duty is to grow a beard and wave the flag. The Chinese naturally trust his motives and leave him unguarded in his new military duties, and when Gym Sock goes AWOL to confront him - not needing to search hundreds of miles of enemy front line because apparently Flag Squad is so famous everyone on the enemy team just knows where they are - the two brothers engage in - surprise, surprise! another fist fight! - for ten minutes without Gym Sock saying "hey I'm your brother" and without John Wayne figuring that out for himself.
Oh, and the ROK fully supports Gym Sock, and muster artillery and air support for his lone wolf mission to seek out his brother. "I'm an Army of One - Move me Out!"
Please.
Please, please, please.
It started out good, and the battle scenes are intense, if phony and staged. Watch the dubbed version.