The Yellow Sea

South Korean director Na Hong-jin (‘The Chaser’) has raided his cooking utensil drawer for this grubby and grim revenge epic in which the kitchen knife is king (but a rusty hatchet will always suffice). Ha Jung-woo is the gambling addict cabbie who’s 60 grand in the hole after his wife went off staking claims in Seoul and never came back. So, he enters into a Faustian pact with a local crime kingpin to wipe his debts. All he has to do is head to the big city and assassinate a professor. With a kitchen knife. And while he’s there he can track down his missus. Win-win! After a ruthlessly focused, almost-Hitchcockian first hour, Na’s film fans out into a flabby, multi-stranded gang war and loses all sense of purpose. A listless succession of brutal, consequence-free stabbings encase a pair of lengthy chase set pieces, both technically adept, both utterly ridiculous.