People working at a South Korean and a North Korean Embassy must try to get out of Mogadishu when rebels are trying to take over the capital. So the South and North Koreans must forget that they are enemies. But will they manage to do that?
The movie is based on true events. But I got a feeling that what we see wasn’t exactly what happened in reality. There’s one long action sequence that doesn’t fit in at all. It’s the scene when one of the Koreans tries to show the white flag to the military. All things go to hell after that. That sequence failed miserably. It felt forced just so that the movie could show us a long action sequence.
Besides the long action sequence, there’s not much going on here. Escape from Mogadishu feels like a generic, South Korean movie that has cold and uninteresting characters. Again they are sloppy with their character building and character depth. And many of the characters feel like caricatures. This isn’t the first time in a South Korean movie. I expect more when a movie is based on true events. I expect to follow characters that feel like regular human beings in a difficult situation. But the movie didn’t give me that feeling at all.
The characters don’t have any personalities besides that some of them are North Koreans and South Koreans. But who are they? Why should we care about them? Do they deserve our sympathy? I couldn’t care less about them.
There’s a scene at the Italian Embassy that feels human. But other than that scene, we are following a bunch of cardboard figures. And that’s not very interesting.
I was disappointed with this movie. It doesn’t offer many action scenes. It tries to focus on the usual South and North Korean skepticism and paranoia when they have to cooperate. But we have seen this so many times. For this to work, the characters must be interesting, and they must have some personality. But the characters in Escape from Mogadishu feel like programmed Korean robots. They are so boring, and the emotions the movie tries to convey, feels fake.