WAR EPIC BLEEDS MELODRAMA.

Byline: Bob Strauss Film Critic

EVERY WAR is traumatic, but there was something exceptionally so about the Korean War. Suddenly invaded by the communist North in June of 1950, the South Korean army was knocked back to the very tip of the peninsula. Fortunes reversed with the U.S.-led landing at Inchon, and by autumn Southern troops were in sight of their divided country's border with China - over which a million Red Chinese soon streamed, knocking the South and its U.N. allies back to the dividing line that separates the two Koreas to this day.

All this considered, it's easy to understand why Kang Je-gyu's battle epic ``Tae Guk Gi: The Brotherhood of War'' is one of the most overwrought war movies ever made. I'll be the first to admit that cultural differences colored my response to the film, which was a massive hit in South Korea. But I don't think I'll be the last Westerner who found it hard to sit through two hours and 20 minutes worth of melodramatic plotting, hysterical acting and brutally graphic combat sequences that are all shot in the same herky-jerky, dirt-sprayed, irritating way.

That said, ``Tae Guk Gi,'' which takes its name from the national flag, is no simplistic flag-waver. Though unswervingly anti-Communist, it's equally as critical of the often authoritarian side of the South, and is as thorough an overall anti-war statement as any ever put on screen. How such finely textured political ambivalence comes out of so histrionic a presentation is a mystery, but it is also undeniably the picture's unique strength.

The film follows the tormented military experiences of two Seoul brothers, Lee Jin-tae (Jang Dong-gun), a tough, semi-literate shoe repairman, and the younger, more sensitive student Lee Jin-seok (Won Bin), his widowed mother's hope for the family's future.

The loving siblings are reluctantly impressed into the South's army just before the capital falls. They somehow survive the horrid siege around the holdout port of Pusan, where they meet various one-dimensional war buddies who introduce themselves by describing their distinguishing characteristic (some writer, this Kang). Brawnier and bolder, Jin-tae figures out that, if he wins a medal, he can request that his brother be relieved of duty. But it sure takes a lot of courageous hot-dogging to get decorated in this army, and as the Lees fight their way up to the Yalu River, Jin-seok grows to resent his brother's increasing violence and glory-hogging.

These guys argue so much, and so shrilly, that they often seem to be fighting their own separate war with one another (and by the film's climactic battle they are). Attendant conflicts, involving everything from a childhood friend forced to fight for the Communists to the terrible fate of Jin-tae's fiancee (Lee Eun-joo) back in liberated but far from peaceful Seoul, drive the Lees to ever more extreme behavior.

It's all accompanied by syrupy choir music and enough blown-off body parts to make a dozen ``Saving Private Ryans,'' and framed by modern-day sequences of astounding sentimental indulgence. Yet for all its bluntness and indelicate storytelling, ``Tae Guk Gi'' leaves us hotly questioning what all of the pain and angst was for. In that way, it's emblematically Korean - and, inflamed theatrics aside, universally true.

Bob Strauss, [phone]

bob.strauss(at)dailynews.com

TAE GUK GI: THE BROTHERHOOD OF WAR - Two and one half stars

(R: violence, language)

Starring: Jang Dong-gun, Won Bin, Lee Eun-joo.

Director: Kang Je-gyu.

Running time: 2 hr. 20 min.

Playing: Wide release.

In a nutshell: Melodramatic to a fault, this Korean War epic about two brothers brutalized by the fighting doesn't stint on the gore of war, either. In Korean with English subtitles.

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Photo:

Won Bin, left, and Jang Dong-gun star as brothers changed by the Korean War in ``Tae Guk Gi.''