Yellow Sea

This highly efficient Korean thriller from the director of the ultra-violent The Chaser has an unremarkable plot: a taxi driver at the end of his tether is induced to carry out a murder in Seoul and finds himself crushed between two different branches of the mafia and goes on the run. The film does, however, in addition to moving with the speed of a bullet, have three distinctive features; it's the first Korean thriller to have attracted a major investment from a Hollywood studio; knives and axes are the gangsters' weapons of choice and they go about their work gleefully in pools of blood; and, the desperate hero comes from Yanji City in the curious Chinese enclave of Yanbian, an autonymous prefecture abutting China, Russia and North Korea largely populated by Koreans carrying Chinese identity papers.