Escape from Mogadishu

In this Argo-ish, Black Hawk Down-ish thriller, North and South Kore­an diplo­mats are forced to co-oper­ate in order to get them­selves and their fam­i­lies out of the increas­ing­ly war-torn cap­i­tal. Kore­an direc­tor Ryoo Seung-wan uses the fraught atmos­phere of Escape From Mogadishu to kick off mus­ings about the arbi­trary bor­der between North and South.

A brief pre-cred­its pre-amble sets up its mul­ti­ple ide­o­log­i­cal bat­tles – the film is set dur­ing a long cam­paign to get Korea into the UN, with fierce, under­hand­ed com­pe­ti­tion between the ambas­sadors from the North and the South, and civ­il war is about to break out in Somalia.

There’s a comedic edge to the self-cen­tred­ness of these polit­i­cal manoeu­vrings in the ear­ly stages of the film, which only becomes more absurd as that bureau­crat­ic farce car­ries on into life-and-death cir­cum­stances. In their por­tray­al of this, the prin­ci­pal actors Kim Yoon-seok and Jo In-sung do well to show this ruth­less manip­u­la­tive­ness soft­en­ing into gen­uine empa­thy, even if it takes a cou­ple of round­house kicks to the chest to get there.

Speak­ing of which, for all the urgency that Escape from Mogadishu seems to high­light through its often bru­tal vio­lence there’s fair­ly lit­tle in the way of actu­al action set-pieces, aside from a quick indoor fist­fight between two of the diplo­mats (yes, real­ly) and its final, man­ic car chase. Ryoo lets the ten­sion sim­mer until it final­ly boils over in that excit­ing final sequence, with a num­ber of delight­ful visu­al tricks up its sleeve as the cam­era trav­els through shod­di­ly bul­let­proof cars, flee­ing from mul­ti­ple assailants.

The relent­less­ness of that sequence ampli­fies the gen­uine heart­break in con­sid­er­ing how, inevitably, after all this, chilly hos­til­i­ty must be for­mer­ly resumed, and while Ryoo’s dream of peace­ful uni­ty is sim­ple, the way in which he presents the arbi­trari­ness of that divide is utter­ly com­pelling. It’s not only in action that Ryoo’s go-to cin­e­matog­ra­ph­er Choi Young-hwan shines, with his vivid, sun-kissed visu­als mak­ing even the out­doors feel claus­tro­pho­bic under the feel of swel­ter­ing heat.

While it does raise an eye­brow that there’s lit­tle Soma­li per­spec­tive behind the cam­era, Ryoo at least depicts these events with some thought­ful­ness and human­ism, show­ing the ease with which the state police descend into vio­lent pow­er trips, and the des­per­a­tion of some of the youths who end up tak­ing up arms, with­out sim­pli­fy­ing things to ​“both sides!” moral­is­ing about the rebellion.

Not only that, it’s also cog­nisant about the role of for­eign inter­ven­tion in the out­break of vio­lence, delv­ing into the arma­ment of both sides of the con­flict, which is then used as polit­i­cal ammo by the South Kore­an diplo­mats. They only view the poten­tial for vio­lence in the abstract, ignor­ing the impli­ca­tions for the peo­ple them­selves – which, of course, comes back around when the civ­il war breaks out, that lever­age the ambas­sadors seen in its ful­ly tan­gi­ble, hor­ri­ble consequences.

Escape From Mogadishu doesn’t delve very deep into the caus­es or ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the rebel­lion and sub­se­quent civ­il war, but it doesn’t ignore them.

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