Definitely not a 7.8

Just watched this film. Wasn't that great, so why all the love? There are so many other, better political/military films out there that aren't so overladen with melodrama (Most notably the Tom Clancy adaptions). The director probably just watched a bit too much JAG. Acting on the most part was decent, OK plot that could have been handled slightly better, some contrived scenarios. Such as how at every chance he can get, the director shoves in ANOTHER history lesson, usually in the form of the laughable Swiss guy monologuing to the female lead. Surely she's qualified and knows about the history and situation at hand? So why treat her character and by extension, the viewing audience as idiots? This is the same problem that plagued The Da Vinci Code, the characters kept explaining to each other what was going on (To let the audience keep up), but the handling of this in both films is just awkward and flawed.

I get the impression the director was trying way too hard to make this some conflicted N vs S story. Making a film that’s set in the backdrop of war that delves into the human aspect of it, is nothing special nor original. And if you want political movies, A Few Good Men is just one film off the top of my head that is much more deftly-handled.

One thing that bugged me was the main female lead. Her accent was horrible. Of course, you might say it's no biggie. But she's supposed to be some highly trained, professional Swiss diplomat who should be used to doing this sort of thing, travelling to all the world hotspots. Frankly, I think it is a big deal when you have a supposedly Swiss woman who isn't supposed to speak Korean well deliver hobbled English dialogue but sounds really fluent in Korean. How am I really supposed to take this seriously when the core protagonist isn’t even believable? And another thing I find weird is that her character's supposed to be Eurasian, again no sign of that. A last complaint about her was that she was decidedly unfit-looking, am I to really suspect she's some highly trained Swiss soldier? Like where she does a 10 second jog with some US Soldiers. It seemed too contrived and forced. And don't give me this "She’s pretty good at English considering… etc etc!" rubbish. That's no excuse. If she can’t handle the dialogue, they could have easily found another. For every actor on screen, I’m sure there’s dozens of others who’d give an arm and leg to take their place.

The amount of JSA love on imdb is in my opinion, unwarranted and I can tell I'm going to cop a lot of flak about this, regardless. So let me just remind you, that this is just my opinion. Don't bring your needless flaming here, saying I'm some hater, some uncultured hack etc. Because I assure you, I've watched hundreds of films from plenty of different genres and know what I’m talking about. My philosophy is that there are countless movies out there begging to be watched, so whenever one film has presents a flaw, it makes a million others look all the more viable. While this is by no means a bad film, there are plenty of others I’d rather be watching and when the inevitably remake is going to be released, I'll guarantee it'll become the better film (Not that elitist purists will care).