The President's Man, an American-style spy film

It's no surprise that The President's Man written and directed by Woo Min-ho has been selected by Korean cinema to compete for the 2021 Oscars. Certainly, having benefited from a certain exclusivity in theaters in the United States, the film pays tribute to American spy films, in particular, those of the 70s including The Conversation by Francis Ford Coppola. Released directly at home in physical format and on video on demand, South Korea's first box office film is now available.

A convincing historical re-enactment

The President's Man / The Jokers Film

1979, Seoul. The President's Man tells the story of the new director of the KCIA, intelligence service linked to the CIA, very close to President Park Chung-hee who ruled South Korea for more than ten years, raising the country among the great economic powers with an austere and authoritarian policy. The former director of the KCIA is in exile in the United States and is in the process of revealing to the world the secrets of power. The new director must respond, although he is more progressive and measured than his peers.

The greatest quality of Woo Min-ho's film lies in its historical re-enactment and everything that encompasses it. Indeed, The President's Man develops an excellent demonstrative work like its sets, its impressive visual effects and allows itself with ease to revive this era of the late 70s, evolving its plot in the United States, but also in France where the reconstruction is also very accurate. Woo Min-ho and his team wanted to give their film a real artistic ambition in the historical approach and this is very successful, not having to blush in front of the big American names telling for decades the history of other peoples around the world with, very often, an imperial work on the reconstruction.

In this, The President's Man is imposing and it is quite surprising that it is so inspired by American cinema without using its own heritage of a cinema in full expansion with films like Parasite by Bong Joon-ho or Mademoiselle by Park Chan-wook, to quote a film working on reconstruction, Having had some success on the international market yet with a very characteristic cinema. Perhaps this is where the limit of Woo Min-ho's film emerges, intruding into a déjà vu commercial subgenre, although it tells a fascinating historical event in South Korea's contemporary history.

A film limited by its genre

The President's Man / The Jokers Film

It would be difficult to ignore the desire of Woo Min-ho and his team to give The President's Man a great technicality and a solid staging work. This is the genre that crushes here all creative madness for a film that struggles to distinguish itself, often academic, despite beautiful moments of composition and elegant light. We will also regret an underused cast with in particular the very good Lee Byung-hun (I met the Devil) having very few original moments working a rather bland game palette as well as Kwak Do-won (Imperial in The Strangers) not really being able to express all his talent. A cast in the image of a film having everything to exploit a certain dynamic, finally almost absent from the film, developing a desire for cold cinema and finally not so accessible despite its efforts to stick to a very common genre in large-scale cinema. It is finally its subject and its historical dimension that saves The President's Man and especially develops a Korean look at its own history and its links with the United States in the 70s. All this gives Woo Min-ho's film a certain interest and builds the suspense of the plot in total immersion in the power games of an authoritarian system. In the end, the director does a remarkable job of bringing this period to life and builds an appreciable dive into the skin of an important historical figure of South Korea. This President 's Man Who Will Change the Course of History is available in a beautiful edition distributed by The Jokers Film and is also available on VOD.