Cowboys and Asians

In the wake of last week's deadly artillery exchange between North and South Korea, Jeff Yang looks at the big-budget Hollywood-Seoul co-production "The Warrior's Way" -- and considers the unique role Hollywood action films have played in shaping American (and Korean) political identity

Call it irony, or call it kismet. This weekend, after many months of anticipation, South Korean director Sngmoo Lee's genre-busting blockbuster, "The Warrior's Way," is poised to slash its way into cineplexes from San Francisco to Seoul. The timing is eerie: Who could have predicted that its release would come during a tense and bloody showdown between Lee's native country and its estranged brotherland to the north?

But such are the machinations of fate. And while the crisis may cast an anxious shadow over the premiere, it also places a spotlight on a film that offers not just the ample pyrotechnics required of an action extravaganza, but some unexpectedly thought-provoking parallels with the real-world drama unfurling around it.

"Warrior's Way" is a period martial-arts epic featuring Korean superstar Jang Dong-Gun, headliner of two of Korea's biggest-ever hits, "Friend" and "Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War," as its stoic and deadly hero, Yang, an assassin who has attained the status of the world's greatest master of the blade.

Within its first few minutes, however, Lee signals that he's taking the traditional swordsman tale in a wholly unanticipated direction.

After Yang makes the fateful decision to spare the last surviving member of an enemy clan -- a baby girl -- he's forced to flee his own killer brethren, fending off a series of increasingly nasty attempts to eliminate him and his young charge. Finally, he decides that the only way he'll find respite is if he flees across the waters, leaving the movie's fantastical version of Asia, to arrive at an equally fantastical landscape: The Wild West of the American imagination.

Coming upon a decrepit frontier town long past its boom, Yang seals his sword to its scabbard and adopts a quiet and obscure existence as a laundryman and single father. That is, until Yang's deadly skill with sharp objects is discovered by Lynne (Kate Bosworth, "Superman Returns"), a girl seeking revenge against the murderer of her family: The vicious ex-army officer known only as the Colonel (Danny Huston of "X-Men Origins: Wolverine").

What ensues is an ecstatic hybrid of Eastern and Western genre mythologies, featuring fever-dream fight sequences between swordsmen and ninjas and gunslingers (oh my!). Also, clowns! It's all weirdly eclectic and, for true-blue action fans, wildly entertaining.

But what makes the film more than just an incipient cult classic are the deeper themes that director Lee has embedded within it -- themes that are proving unusually resonant with present-day events.

After all, "Warrior's Way" is a film about a quiet community striving toward prosperity that comes under unprovoked attack by a self-aggrandizing psychopath from a neighboring wasteland. It features a clan whose members are divided against themselves, driven by history and human caprice to treat their own kin as enemy. It explores how violence scars the fates of its victims and practitioners alike, and how vengeance reproduces itself virally, transmitting the thirst for mayhem endlessly across generations.

Most importantly, it puts a lens on the meaning of heroism, from both Eastern and Western perspectives, and in doing so, illuminates some uncomfortable realities about how the iconography of the Hollywood hero has shaped contemporary politics -- in the U.S., and on the Korean peninsula.

In short, there's a relevance and sophistication to "Warrior's Way" that belies its kaleidoscopic action-genre surface. Of course, as far as Sngmoo Lee is concerned, that should be the default, not the exception.