He's four months behind in rent, and everything in his life depresses him, including Eun-sung, and his sympathetic landlord's nosy wife. At first, he's a deadbeat dad who cares more for his taxi cab's broken rear-view mirror than he does about his fellow man. The same is thankfully not true of Sa-bok. You're not alone." As a result, there's never a moment where Peter's motives are small enough to be sensible. Reporters go wherever there is news," and "Once this footage airs, the entire world will be watching. Peter's essentially a sandwich board-sized blank slate that Eom and Jang plaster with unbelievable rationalizing like "I'm a reporter. Still, there's nothing more frustrating than watching Peter portrayed as a starch-stiff supporting character whose very presence is supposed to awaken noble aspirations in a lead character.
This uncritical deference is almost certainly an ingrained peril of working with the real life Linzpeter shortly before his death. This myopic interest in Sa-bok as a zero-to-hero success story is instantly frustrating since it means that Peter is left largely undeveloped. All we know about him is that he saw that a news story needed reporting, then traveled from Tokyo to Seoul to Gwangju, and finally reported the news because he wanted to shed light on the situation. Screenwriter Yu-na Eom and director Hun Jang (" Rough Cut," "Secret Reunion") both focus primarily on Sa-bok's transformation into a political figurehead. Unfortunately, Sa-bok, a character who is most human when he is most neurotic, eventually becomes completely unsympathetic once he stops being selfish, and starts acting like a man on the road to an unbelievable moral awakening. He learns to become a better, more politically conscious man after he chauffeurs Jürgen-referred to as "Peter" throughout the movie-past military barricades and into Gwangju. Sa-bok's story is, as realized in the film, fairly trite. It might not be remembered as a great one in the history of cinema, but it will unfailingly trigger a sense of nationalism in its audiences.Song plays Sa-bok Kim, a penny-pinching widower and the oblivious father of pre-teen Eun-sung (Eun-mi Yoo). Overall “A Taxi Driver” is a celebration of faith, friendship and patriotism. You may also like : Best of Iranian Director Majid Majidi The tight camera work, beautiful locales and the sharp-edged storyline collectively make it an edge of your seat political thriller. But the proficiency of the director helps us to overlook these flaws. But sadly Thomas Kretschmann falls flat in his role as the German Reporter.Ĭoming to the screenplay of the movie, in order to simplify the twisted political scenario, they deliberately avoided some facts and replaced them with soothing fiction. Song Kang-ho’s immaculate performance as the widowed taxi driver will make you feel every bit of his happiness, anxiety, remorse and pride. The movie’s USP lies in the performances of some well known and some unknown Korean actors. The director very efficiently strikes a balance between an impassioned fictional tale and an atrocious historical event. But quite predictably Man-seob couldn’t hold on to his expediency and transforms himself to a man of virtue. When the opportunism of the protagonist is compared with the benevolence of the protestors, you might feel tempted to hate the former. As the story progresses, we are introduced to some selfless rebels, who are fighting for the cause. Whether he makes it back safely to his daughter, who is clueless about her father’s whereabouts, or he gets entangled in the vicious circumstances and never returns to Seoul.you can never predict this until and unless you reach the very dramatic climax. But the moment he realizes the gravity of the situation, he tries his very best to flee. Man-seob, unaware of the turbulence he is heading towards, is hugely excited about the large sum of money he has been promised. The assignment is to take a German reporter ( Thomas Kretschmann) to Gwangju and then drive him back to Seoul before curfew.
Without having the slightest hint of the nature of that job, he snatches it from a fellow taxi driver. Kim Man-seob ( Song Kang-ho), a cabby, who finds it difficult to make ends meet, suddenly stumbles upon a lucrative offer. Based on South Korea’s Gwangju uprising, this movie illustrates how an ordinary man can rise above his self-interest and jeopardize his life for a greater cause. Director Jang Hoon’s A Taxi Driver (Taeksi woonjunsa) (2017) very empathetically narrates a man’s journey from a close-fisted single parent to a vehement patriot.