Rating summary

Movie		3.5
Video		4.5
Audio		4.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		4.0

The Suspect Blu-ray Movie Review

A usual 'Suspect', but still a lot of fun.

Reviewed by Jeffrey Kauffman July 23, 2014

The so-called “Axis of Evil” includes the seemingly hermetically sealed nation of North Korea, but as the bristling 2013 South Korean thriller The Suspect makes clear, the axis may have at least partially tipped southward itself, courtesy of a host of top echelon North Korean defectors as well as a duplicitous South Korean or two. The long simmering Korean conflict is a major subtext of The Suspect, though for Western audiences who probably consider any discussion of the relationship between the neighbors and erstwhile unified nation either boring beyond belief or at best Ancient History, there’s really no major problem in understanding the basic ins and outs of this film’s admittedly convoluted storyline. That said, The Suspect requires a bit of patience, for in its slam bang way, it breathlessly marauds through a lot of information for at least its first hour, not always dealing with events in a strictly chronological or even fully explicated manner. There’s a none too subtle evocation of the same manic tendencies that informed The Bourne Trilogy, but here, under the hyperkinetic eye of director Won Shin-yun, action set pieces tend to just suddenly erupt out of the ether with no foreshadowing, filling the screen with incredible stunt work and gasp inducing vertiginous camera moves, only to just as suddenly fade away as the already hopped up narrative once again takes over. For those who don’t mind this kind of intentionally bumpy roller coaster ride, The Suspect is a lot of fun, if also occasionally a bit exhausting.

The Suspect fairly bursts at the seams throughout its opening act (and arguably even through its second), with a rapid fire assault of quick cutting vignettes that seemingly chaotically introduces a host of characters, all of whom will (of course) soon enough be linked in what amounts to a major conspiracy thriller. The film’s major conceit (evidently based on fact, at least if we’re to take any number of similarly themed Korean actioners of the past few years) that a whole host of North Korean defectors have emigrated south, supposedly having given up their ties to Pyongyang. That of course turns out to be a questionable assumption, though The Suspect also paints a somewhat ambiguous picture concerning the South Korean military and its police force. Evidently North Korea’s tentacles, while hidden, reach far into South Korea’s elite.

The film plays out as a cat and mouse game concerning Ji Dong-chul (Gong Yoo), a former North Korean operative who has migrated south to work for a tycoon who himself had North Korean connections in days of yore. When the tycoon is assassinated and Dong-chul, who actually fights off the attacker (only too late to save his boss), is accused of the murder. A no nonsense Colonel named Min Se-hoon (Park Hee-soon) is tasked with bringing in the fugitive, though it’s ultimately revealed that Se-hoon and Dong-chul have a shared past of their own, and that Se-hoon is possibly being manipulated by a duplicitous South Korean intelligence officer named Kim Seok-ho (Jo Sung-ha). As if that didn’t provide enough plot to keep track of, there’s also a documentary filmmaker named Choi Kyung-hee (Yoo Da-in) who had been trailing Dong-chul before the murder in order to feature him in a piece she was doing on North Korean defectors. Once the murder aspect starts unfolding, Kyung-hee is still involved, though it turns out that she, like virtually everyone else in this jam packed thriller, is hiding a secret or two about her real motivations.

From the first breakneck montage which opens the film in a decidedly disjointed manner, it’s obviouis that The Suspect is going to careen wildly among various characters and situations without taking the time to fully explain things to the audience. Therefore, it takes quite some time before relatively important plot points like a tragedy which befell Dong- chul’s family to ever really be explicitly detailed. Even then, material like this tends to come in dribs and drabs, to the point that some aspects of the film are delivered almost subliminally through a nonstop series of quick edits, some of which last barely a second or two. It’s thriller by flash card, but quite surprisingly, it tends to work more often than not.

There are a number of almost lunatic set pieces that, as stated before, just kind of rise up out of nowhere like a martial arts infused Venus from the half shell. In fact, the first two hand to hand combat sequences may well take a lot of viewers by surprise, since the film just goes from 0 to 60 in about a nanosecond. Other whimsical elements include a frightening but hilarious skydiving sequence that sees one guy getting jettisoned from the aircraft carrier without a parachute, and the trust Colonel diving into the air after him, zooming through space like an Asian Superman. Other elements are more clearly derivative of spy thrillers like the aforementioned Bourne Trilogy, especially with sequences like a rooftop chase that includes some Parkour moves. The good news is, the film moves so briskly that few will really be bothered by anything that reminds them of another film, simply because there’s some new set piece to replace it within a few minutes.

The direction here is extremely facile, if filled with a number of similarly derivative elements like quick cuts, distressed looking video, and the ever popular shaky cam. But The Suspect is so relentless in delivering a battery of action with some actual character development that even a Xerox copy seems unusually authentic.

The Suspect Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

The Suspect is presented on Blu-ray courtesy of Well Go USA with an AVC encoded 1080p transfer in 2.39:1. Shot digitally with a variety of cameras, The Suspect boasts a very sharp image almost all of the time, with excellent fine detail in the glut of extreme close-ups Won Shin-yun seems to favor (see any number of the screenshots included with this review for several good examples). Some of the film has been fairly aggressively color graded, although the usual blue tones for spy thrillers have been replaced by a kind of green-yellow tint, something that surprisingly does not seem to rob the image of much if any fine detail. Contrast is generally strong and depth of field in several outdoor shots is outstanding. The only real complaint here is a very light dusting of noise in a couple of darker sequences. Otherwise, The Suspect looks great in high definition.

The Suspect Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

The Suspect's lossless DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 track (in the original Korean) provides the expected amount of boisterous LFE, along with some extremely well done immersion courtesy of a whole host of good foley effects in the virtually nonstop action scenes. The hand to hand combat is full of great cracking and popping noises that dot around the side channels, and other action sequences, like the madcap skydiving segment, have similar attention paid to very immersive sound design. Dialogue and score are both presented very cleanly and clearly in this track. Fidelity is top notch and dynamic range is extremely wide.

The Suspect Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

• Trailer (1080p; 1:33)

The Suspect Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

Clocking in at well over two hours, by the time The Suspect delivers the last of several twists, some viewers may have already collapsed from exhaustion, especially since this film rarely takes a moment to relax, cartwheeling madly from action set piece to action set piece. What's actually more than a bit surprising here is how fully developed the two main characters end up being by the time everything is said and done. There's a lot about The Suspect you've seen before in other films, but it's assembled here with a great deal of craft, if not nuance, and the result is a breathless adventure that doesn't even require a Master's Thesis understanding of what the 38th parallel is all about. Technical merits here are generally very strong, and even without much in the way of supplements, The Suspect comes Highly recommended.