Past Misdeeds: The Terror Live (2013)

aka 90 Minutes of Terror

Original title: 더 테러 라이브 (deu tae-ro ra-i-beu)

Through the transformation of the glorious WTF-Films into the even more glorious Exploder Button and the ensuing server changes, some of my old columns for the site have gone the way of all things internet. I’m going to repost them here in irregular intervals in addition to my usual ramblings.

Please keep in mind these are the old posts presented with only  basic re-writes and improvements. Furthermore, many of these pieces were written years ago, so if you feel offended or need to violently disagree with me in the comments, you can be pretty sure I won’t know why I wrote what I wrote anymore anyhow.

Formerly highly popular news anchor Yoon Yeong-hwa (Ha Jeong-woo) has been demoted to an early morning radio programme, and he is quite bitter about it. So it looks like a fine chance for getting his old job back to him when a caller to his show threatens to blow up a bomb he has deposited on a bridge, and really does bring a bomb to explosion when Yoon berates him off the air. Yoon doesn’t take long to finagle this exclusive (what do you mean, call in the police?) into the promise of a return to his old job by his former boss Cha Dae-eun (Lee Kyeong-yeong).

It’s just a question of getting the terrorist to talk. Turns out he is more than willing to do that, for he wants the South Korean president to apologize for the death of three construction workers on the very same bridge he just damaged. He says the deaths could have been avoided if the country actually gave a shit about its working class. Oh, and he has more bombs tucked away somewhere he’ll detonate if he doesn’t get his way, like, for example, the one hidden in Yoon’s earpiece.

Not surprisingly, Yoon finds himself losing control of the situation he was planning to exploit for his own gain, and soon, politicians, his media colleagues and the police are all trying to use the situation for their own gain, or at least to avoid embarrassment. And if avoiding embarrassment means letting a few people getting blown up by a bomb, then so be it, at least if the situation can be turned around so somebody else is going to carry the responsibility in the public eye. Why, the people in power let a guy blowing up bridges and an egocentric former news anchor look like oases of morality.

Which, obviously, is the point that makes Kim Byeong-woo’s thriller The Terror Live as interesting as it is exciting. I can hardly remember seeing a big mainstream production like this being this openly angry about the state of the world in general, and the country it was made in in particular. It’s an anger that can only ever portray any form of authority – be it the media, the police, or even the head of state - as a quietly monstrous entity whose only interests lie in not shaking up the status quo and getting fat from it.

Of course, this anger is expressed through the methods of a very tight, slick and highly paranoid thriller, and might therefore not be taken seriously by everyone, but then, if director Kim had only wanted to make a nice little thriller without meaning or wanting any of its political implications, he’d probably have made a jingoistic film about evil foreign terrorists hunted and killed by heroic South Korean special forces people; it wouldn’t be the first one. One would suspect that sort of thing would have been an easier sell compared to a movie that makes paranoid US movies from the 70s look calm and hopeful.

Be that as it may, the film’s angry politics – which I can’t find myself disagreeing with, not only when it comes to South Korea - are packaged in quite an incredible thriller. The film mostly takes place inside of Yoon’s radio studio, with what would be the big destruction set pieces in most other movies only shown in form of news footage or tiny camera feeds Yoon is looking at. In the hands of a lesser director, this approach might have been a bit disappointing and cheap, as if the audience had been invited to a wedding but then only got to watch an episode of a reality TV show about weddings, yet in Kim’s hands, it helps the film focusing on the important bits of its story, people.

Ha Jeong-woo’s surprisingly nuanced portrayal of a man who thinks he can buy his way back into the world’s good graces by sheer bastardry but then has to learn that there are always bigger bastards, and who rediscovers the existence of his conscience only to also learn that his conscience won’t save him in a world where possessing this sort of thing is only a hindrance is particularly remarkable here, and is certainly just as important for selling a highly unsympathetic man like Yoon as the film’s protagonist as is a script (also written by Kim) that really goes out of its way to give Ha nuances to work with.

An additional joy is the sheer drive of the film, the way in which it sells a plot that on paper sounds just a bit too constructed through focus and energy. There’s just no room for thinking “you know, our terrorist is absurdly good at what he does, isn’t he?” while the movie does everything in its power of convincing you that this isn’t a point worth dwelling upon while you’re watching. Consequently, I’d find it dishonest to complain about something like this afterwards.


Which leads me to quite a luxurious problem to have when writing up a movie: there really isn’t anything to complain about when talking about The Terror Live. It’s a film that knows what it wants in each second of its running time, and seems to have no trouble at all realizing it. It also suggests the slump I thought South Korean genre cinema to be in doesn’t actually exist.