A very intelligent Seargent of the North Korean border force meticulously plans his escape from his base and through minefields to get to South Korea.
He scouts out his escape route at night, makes elaborate plans, draws maps and hides them and more useful items until he needs them.
Buuut on the day of his planned escape everything goes awry and absolutely nothing goes right.
Instead of reaching South Korea he even ends up in the lion's den - a highly guarded party for the military elite in a far away town.
He still tries to flee though and gets into one tough situation after the other.
It is quite like a James Bond movie.
The dangerous situations he gets in are always surprising and you don't see them coming.
And how he manages to get out of them is even more surprising and like in a good James Bond movie he does so with intelligence, wits and smarts.
There is a lot of James-Bond-like irony, fun and black humor in this movie and it is almost always intelligent and clever.
You constantly think "There is no way the hero can get out of this now!"
But he does - and always in a very surprising and clever way.
What makes the escape of our hero extremely difficult is the fact that the antagonist who hunts him, is extremely intelligent too.
The bad guy is a little bit psycho like a James Bond villain but knows the hero from when they were younger and even tries to help him in the beginning.
I really enjoyed watching this clever and smart movie and the battle of wits between the two main characters.
Why then, only (highly deserved) 8 stars and not ten, you might ask?
Well, towards the end, the movie starts to have some really stupid moments and some things happen that are just not believable and totally out of character for the hero and the villain.
It also gets a bit schmaltzy.
It's like they changed the clever screenwriters after just three quarters of the script were finished and the new ones were not quite up to the job.
But the last quarter of the movie is still good but by far not as surprising, thrilling and clever as the rest.
I still highly recommend watching it.
