Summary
Humint misses some open goals when it comes to exploring its political setup and moral underpinnings, but it delivers high-quality action by the bucketload in the back half.
Most action movies treat their plot as a conveyor belt for fight scenes and their characters like crash test dummies, so on that level, at least, there’s nothing unusual about writer-director Ryoo Seung-wan’s Netflix flick Humint. But most action movies don’t have a premise as politically intriguing and morally contorted as the one here, which finds rival South and North Korean secret agents attempting to save the same woman from a human trafficking operation out of the Russian city of Vladivostok.
The simplest way of putting it is that Humint is a very good action movie and a ropey, superficial spy thriller, and the resultant cinematic chimera thus feels wedged a bit awkwardly between its two masters. The necessary character depth and thematic texture required for the latter keep getting lost in all the fancy-pants action bombast required for the former, and each detracts from the other. The good news is that Ryoo’s facility for action – he has been a bit of a genre wunderkind since his turn-of-the-century breakthrough Die Bad – is enough that the all-action third act feels like a welcome payoff for all the wonky build-up, even if you won’t care a great deal about what’s happening or remember much of it after the credits roll.
Human intelligence – the title is a portmanteau – refers to information acquired in-person, often by informants trapped in dangerous predicaments, handled by state agents. Manager Zo (Zo In-sung) is one such agent, working on behalf of South Korea’s National Intelligence Service. Ostensibly the good guys, the NIS still put the mission first, which means when things go pear-shaped, it’s the (often innocent) informants who pay the price.
Zo is still reeling from losing his first informant in nasty and avoidable circumstances when he’s dispatched to Vladivostok to cultivate another, a woman named Chae Seon-hwa (Shin Sae-kyeong) who is working in a North Korean restaurant. The Russian city is close to the North Korean border, and is believed to be the focal point of an expansive mafia-controlled human trafficking and drug dealing operation supposedly masterminded by North Korean officials.
Pyongyang believes the same thing, and that the local consul general, Hwang Chi-sung (Park Hae-joon), is leveraging his responsibility to round up defectors and ship them back to North Korea to send a few women the mafia’s way. Thus, they dispatch Park Geon (Park Jeong-min) to figure out what’s going on. However, as quickly becomes clear, Park knows Seon-hwa from back in Korea, and quickly becomes adamant about saving her from her fate, all while Manager Zo is attempting to do the same.
After an early scene-setting action beat, Humint settles into a surprisingly steady, plotty rhythm to establish these various moving parts, which is where you can see all the seams. The spy stuff simply isn’t good enough to support being the focal point, and the moral conundrum of running assets for the greater good is only lightly explored. Likewise, the political context of North Korean officials in cahoots with the Russian Mafia is expressed in almost cartoonish terms, with the Russkie Big Bad, in particular, looking like someone kicked Ivan Drago through H&M.
If the slow-burn pace doesn’t suit the movie overall, though, it does build up to a dynamite final third, which is packed to the rafters with fun action. We’re talking fist-fights, car chases, shootouts, the whole nine, all handled with a real deft hand by Ryoo and the actors, who are much better physical performers than emotional ones. The inevitable climactic team-up yields no surprises whatsoever, but it’s tremendous fun, and a cut above most streaming action fare (and even tentpole stuff like Shelter, now that I think about it).
The biggest question surrounding Humint is whether people will have already checked out by that point, which is understandable. Mileage may vary, since the opening hour or so is a muddle, but I’d say that the patience necessary to get through it is capably rewarded by the end.
