[HanCinema's Film Review] "Decibel"

Commander Kang (played by Kim Rae-won) was once the captain of a submarine. A disaster related to that submarine led to Commander Kang being decorated as a hero, an honor he knows he doesn't deserve. So it is that a year after that incident, Commander Kang's former subordinate Lieutenant Jeon (played by Lee Jong-suk) begins to decide sound-operated bombs, creating a terrorist crisis a year after the submarine incident concluded.

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I had to write that synopsis in a rather roundabout way to avoid spoilers. And I'm pretty sure I still failed, since I think technically the fact that Lieutenant Jeon is the person designing the bombs is a plot twist. It's a little hard to tell, since Commander Kang knows the entire time that Lieutenant Jeon is the person behind the terrorist attacks, he's just needlessly vague about actually saying that out loud.

This is the main problem with "Decibel" overall really. Almost nothing about Commander Kang or Lieutenant Jeon is all that interesting. They show a fair amount of personality on the submarine but that prelude to the proper film is quite short, and it isn't until a flashback near the end of the movie that "Decibel" clearly explains what exactly happened on the submarine that got Lieutenant Jeon so upset that he decided to become a terrorist.

And that explanation is...not convincing. I'm pretty sure screenwriter Lee Jin-hoon knew it wasn't convincing either, which is why the script has to add in a whole subplot about a cover-up as to the source of the accident on the submarine. This changes nothing about the ethical dilemma that motivated Lieutenant Jeon to start planting bombs all over the place. Given how smart Lieutenant Jeon is purported to be, you'd think he could have come up with a better plan than this, or at least a more plausible one.

But more than the nitty gritty of the plot, "Decibel" is mostly just incredibly dull. For a movie that's supposed to be about sound-sensitive explosives, "Decibel" is also really quiet, with almost no music or sound effects to speak of, but lots of fairly uninspired dialog that doesn't do much except repeat information that the viewer already knows. The characters are likewise archetypal and mostly useless. Commander Kang has a wife and kid who serve no apparent purpose except as hostages.

I wonder if at some point "Decibel" was just premised as a submarine movie before all this action stuff was added on. It's certainly not a good sign for a movie when its most intriguing setting is the one that's almost immediately abandoned, serving no purpose except as backstory for a much less interesting movie. At one point Lieutenant Jeon hints that the entire story might have just been a hallucination, and honestly? That would have been an improvement. Looking at the runtime, it's a bit remarkable to me just how few twists there were, and how little there was for any individual character to do.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Decibel" is directed by Hwang In-ho, and features Kim Rae-won, Lee Jong-suk, Jung Sang-hoon, Park Byung-eun, Lee Sang-hee, Jo Dal-hwan. Release date in Korea: 2022/11/16.

Available on DVD from YESASIA

DVD English Subtitled

DVD TW English Subtitled