"Mission, Steal the Top Star"

Yoon Bin (played byOh Chang-seok) is a top star. He's kind of a jerk and an idiot, but not excessively so. Yeong-sook (played byYoon Ah-min) is the woman who kidnaps him. She's kind of mean and has a bad attitude, but not excessively so. Soo-jin (played byKim Joo-ri) is a reporter. She's alternately aggressive and demure, but not excessively so. That's "Mission, Steal the Top Star" on a base level. It's a movie about characters who have personalities, but not excessive ones.

Here's what they do have- expressions. Really, I love the expressions in this movie. Especially fromYoon Ah-min. She's always got this very faint look of disgust plastered on her face that's mostly unchanged by circumstance. Frequently I got the feeling that the characters themselves were rather annoyed by the lackluster script, and try to take this frustration out on each other violently.

That is, obviously, a bit of a backhanded compliment. But that's more-or-less the kind of movie "Mission, Steal the Top Star" is. It's never bad enough to get offensively stupid, but it's never good enough to really deserve a great deal of praise. Most of the film is set in an abandoned warehouse that actually looks like an abandoned warehouse. I suspect the producers just shopped around randomly and grabbed the lowest bidder.

This kind of low-cost production design creates the feeling of a movie that looks real. I don't mean that in the good, realist mode of movies that supposedly reflect real life while making real life look suspiciously clean and tidy. "Mission, Steal the Top Star" is a sloppy production where everyone involved makes a point of sticking to the few expressions and character relationships they know how to do correctly, because there's not enough budget to hire high-class acting coaches.

I was surprised to learn in the research phase, for example, thatYoon Ah-minisn't a professional fighter, but actually a model. And also that this was actually her voice that we hear on the soundtrack. I was positive that she was dubbed. In essence,Yoon Ah-minputs in an amateurish performance that convinced me she was a completely different kind of amateur than the kind she actually was. I was likewise surprised to discover thatKim Joo-riwas a former Miss Korea, because the movie doesn't make her look that pretty.

As far as the actual plot goes, well, the title says it all really. The parts I found most interesting were the parts I doubt anyone else would find interesting, because the actors themselves tend to have such a significant general disinterest in everything that's going on. As an example, an early bizarre scene appears to be some sort of costume ball auction of random young women.

This scene has nothing to do with anything, and its presence in the movie isn't explained at all until the ending which gets into Yeong-sook's motivation- which oddly enough I hadn't even thought about until that moment. Likewise, Yeong-seok's boyfriend Min-woo (played byKim Jeong-heon) has a similarly pointless role that could have been excised after a few more drafts. That's just the kind of movie "Mission, Steal the Top Star" is- take it or leave it. Not good enough to like, not bad enough to hate.

Review by William Schwartz

"Mission, Steal the Top Star" is directed byNo Byeong-haand featuresOh Chang-seok,Kim Jeong-heon,Kim Joo-riandYoon Ah-min.