There are a number of Korean actors that if I see they are in a film, I am going to watch it. Just like stars in other countries, Song Kang-ho seems to get offered the roles in the better films or maybe the films end up being better because of his presence. It's difficult to say but you can't argue that if a role is good and the writing is good, there is a much better opportunity for a particular actor to shine.
A Taxi Driver is a historical film based on real events in the 80's and this probably made the filming of it in 2017 more difficult because we don't exactly have a bunch of 1980's gear like cars just hanging around. This is kind of evidenced in the movie because while most of the film takes place on the road, as you would expect of a film that is based around a guy driving a taxi, the shots are mostly centered on a couple of vehicles, presumably to eliminate the need to either find hundreds of cars from the 80's, or even worse, to CGI them into the scenes.
As is typical with South Korean films, the overall budget was something that would be considered extremely small by Hollywood standards, so it always impresses me when they are able to make such a wonderful film out of a mere $15 million.
Even if you don't follow Korean cinema - and I really think you should because there are a lot of gems in there - you probably recognize this guy's face from Parasite, which of course was the first "foreign" film to win Best Picture in nearly 100 years.
I started watching Korean and Japanese films on Netflix recently because I have been very disappointed with the English-language films that are on offer and consider a vast majority of them to be garbage and unfortunately this is likely to continue as Netflix loses more and more contracts to show films by studios that are owned by their competitors in the industry.
The film starts out by letting you know that this is based on real events, which to me is always a good thing because I love when I can accidentally learn some history when I am watching something for entertainment. It follows a hard-working widowers taxi-drive named "Kim" and how he ends up being the personal driver for an international reporter from Germany named Jürgen Hinzpeter.
The reporter is trying to obtain footage of antigovernmental uprisings in Gwangju, which is near-ish to the capitol city of Seoul. While I do not know much about the actual events outside of what I was shown in the film, the government at the time was repressing any media coverage of the incident and at least how it is displayed in the film, this was because what the government was doing to quell the uprising was horribly unethical. Therefore, the authorities banned all news coverage of the incidents and most of the citizens of South Korea had no idea what was really going on. They were being told stories about how the rebels were the ones causing all the chaos and the government was basically just being innocent and nice. The reality, at least as it is presented in the film, was a very different story.
[src](https://asianwiki.com/images/5/5e/A_Taxi_Driver-trailer.jpg)Initially, Kim was only taking on this taxi fare because the passenger was paying a really high price to anyone that would drive him to the besieged city and back in a day, and Kim didn't know anything about what was really going on there, nor did he care. He was simply in it for the money.
Things change as he becomes increasingly aware of what is going on and he ends up getting a lot more involved with the locals than he had ever planned on doing so. In this regard the story is more of a human morality tale and how one's perspective of some sort of event in the world can be seriously skewed by what information the government or the media they control, allows the world to see. I think this can be very relevant to a lot of things going on in the world today whenever we see news stories or even more so, any "fact-checking" that goes on towards any media that attempts to tell a story that goes against the mainstream view.
I have seen a lot of Korean films and it is quite unusual for them to incorporate a character into their films that doesn't speak Korean nor do they pretend to understand it in the film. Thomas Kretschmann plays the German reporter and while he certainly isn't "A-list" he has been involved in some rather big hits in such as The Piano and Downfall. Song Kang-ho also doesn't speak English very well and while he is acting and may understand more English than he lets on in the film, the storytelling is one of the language barrier being a very real thing. I cannot stand it when films put a foreign actor into a role with a language they clearly do not speak, but seem to understand all of in the movie. Think of Jared Leto in The Outsider and how his character understood all the Japanese that was being spoken around him, yet rarely has any dialogue of his own - they even overdubbed his lines and kept him in the shadows to hide the fact that he speaks zero Japanese. It's just stupid.
A Taxi Driver at its heart is about the Gwangju Uprising in the early 80's, but it is really about a lot more than that. It is about a selfish man realizing that he has been wrong to be so indifferent towards others, it is about oppression of a people by the government, and ultimately it is about corruption and power. The film will hit you with a big mix of emotions and they even manage to get some comedy in there courtesy of Song Kang-ho's unique passive-aggressive acting style.
Should I watch it?
If you haven't already experienced the majesty that is Korean cinema this could be a good way to get you started. Once you go down that path you have a wonderful treasure-trove of titles that you may have no even considered watching before since Korean films don't really attempt to penetrate international markets outside of rare instances like Parasite. There are so many fantastic South Korean films and I think this is one of them. I really enjoyed this and after a little while I even forgot that I was reading it. If you are going to subject yourself to needing to read subtitles, it may as well be with Korean films.
This movie could also end up being an education of sorts for you as it was for me. It is rare that when a film is over that I want to see more, but that is exactly what happened with A Taxi Driver.
The film is currently available on Netflix in most regions
