Song Joong Ki's K-drama supremacy is sorely missed following the back-to-back box office failures of films Hopeless and Bogota: City of the Lost. Song Joong-ki plays an immigrant who becomes a Colombian crime boss in the Korean film Bogota: City of the Lost, a one-star waste of time.
Korean superstar Song Joong-ki embarks on his latest international adventure in director Kim Seong-je's infuriating Bogota: City of the Lost.
Director: Seong-je Kim
Writers: Seong-je Kim, Hwang Seong-gu
Stars: Cristal Aparicio, Jesus David Becerra, Andrew Gonzalez
The film chronicles the transformation of an impoverished Korean immigrant into a Colombian crime boss, but is sorely lacking in both crime and drama.
The long-delayed production received a subdued reception at the 2024 Busan International Film Festival, while its future beyond the festival seems desperately uncertain.
After trips to Italy (for the K-drama series Vincenzo) and Belgium (for My Name Is Loh Kiwan), Song now heads to South America, butchering another foreign language in the process. The film, set in the aftermath of the IMF crisis that devastated the Korean economy in the late 1990s and left many ordinary citizens destitute, sees 19-year-old Kook-hee (Song) arrive in the Colombian capital with her parents and look to start anew.
Almost immediately, their life savings are stolen and they are forced to claw their way up from poverty. Kook-hee’s father (Kim Jong-soo) seeks out an old friend from the Vietnam War, Sergeant Park (Kwon Hae-hyo), who has made a place for himself in the garment trading industry.
Instead of hiring Kook-hee's father, however, Park's boss prefers the fresh-faced young man.
Before long, "Cookie," as the locals call him, learns the language and becomes familiar with the black market, dealing shady deals with customs officials and other nefarious underworld types.
Cookie's rise through the ranks of Park's criminal empire is not viewed favorably by everyone in the organization, particularly Lil Park (Park Ji-hwan) and Soo-young (Lee Hee-joon), who see their own path to the top threatened by the precocious young man.
At the same time, Cookie's father spirals into drug use and abandons his family.
The problems with Bogotá are rife and severe. First off, it seems like a great effort has been made to film on location in Colombia, with support from the Colombian Film Commission, but the film spectacularly fails to capture the essence of this inherently exotic, sensual and dangerous environment.
The cinematography is flat, while there are almost no Colombian or female characters to speak of, giving the film a painfully emasculated and inert sensibility.
Kook-hee is a bland protagonist who earns neither the audience's sympathy nor disdain during his despotic rise, while the only other memorable character is his rival, Soo-young, mainly because she sports a mustache.
Perhaps most incredible of all is that Bogota attempts to tell a crime saga set in Colombia without dealing in narcotics.
The childish message that “drugs are bad” is as naive as it is clumsy, but it serves as an apt metaphor for this whole adventure: the desire to emulate a seductive and successful formula without daring to get your hands dirty.
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