The detective buddy movie has long been a staple in Korean cinema. In the early 1990s, the Two Cops series featuring Park Joong-hoon was launched to huge acclaim at the Korean box office. Korean crime fighters have been duking it out with crooks, corruption and each other ever since.
Released in 2010, Secret Reunion offers an advance on the Korean cops genre and tweaks it considerably by overlaying the template with the 60-year political stalemate of the Korean peninsula.
Directed by Kim Ki-duk protégé, Jang Hun, Secret Reunion begins with taciturn North Korean spy Ji-won (Gang Don-won) accompanying a fellow undercover agent on a Seoul assassination job. While no shirker when it comes to the mission, the ruthlessness and brutality of his fellow spy – a man known as Shadow (a chilling Jeon Gook-hwan) – is enough to shake Ji-won’s Communist ideals to their very core.
As the North Korean mission is rushed to completion in a Seoul apartment block, a squad of agents from a South Korean intelligence agency arrive at the building with the aim of arresting the Northerners. Heading the agency’s team is Detective Lee Han-kyu (Song Kang-ho supplying his usual charming schtick), who can’t prevent the two spies from slipping the dragnet. Han-kyu catches a glimpse of the younger North Korean agent Ji-won as he escapes, but it’s not enough to satisfy his superiors. For his failure, Han-kyu is expelled from the agency.
After this dynamic opening, the story then jumps six years. Han-kyu now runs a private detective agency specialising in retrieving runaway foreign wives for their Korean husbands. While tracking down a Vietnamese woman at a mine worked on by refugees, Han-kyu spots Ji-won. Ji-won has been on the lam from both South Korean and North Korean forces since the raid six years earlier. Both Ji-won and Han-kyu recognise each other but both act as if it is their first encounter.
Hoping that Ji-won will lead him to the still-at-large Shadow, Han-kyu offers the North Korean a job as a live-in operative in his business. Fun, games and brotherly rivalry ensue in the South Korean male mode. The script bides its time as it develops the inevitable crisis to flush Shadow out into the open.
This is where it helps to be a Song Kang-ho fan. If you have enjoyed this performer in JSA (equal with Memories of Murder for his best role) or his supporting role in Secret Sunshine, then you’ll like this because Song brings all of his cheeky, rambunctious impact to this Korean crime-fighter. However, if you’re one of those people who can’t take to Song’s persona, you better hang on tight, because the film will feel like it is treading water until the finale gets started.
It is with Secret Reunion’s opening and closing fast-paced action sequences that director Hun is in his element. He’s obviously less comfortable and less adept with the light-hearted 'getting-to-know-you' section which, like similar sequences in other Korean North/South films (JSA), are there to remind local audiences that – Shadow’s ruthlessness not withstanding – folks over the border are human, too.
This is where Song’s character could have been more controlled. But despite Song’s tendency to overshadow his co-stars, Gang holds his own as the intense Northern spy on the run. Goh Chang-seok is also very impressive as the Vietnamese gangster (though Vietnamese audiences will probably be less impressed).
