Not worth the hype but still deserves seeing... 
Due to the regular artistic decline of Hong Kong cinema and the lack of genre cinema in it due to the departure of its stars to the US, some movie buffs put their eyes in direction of Korean cinema which had profited of that lack with a huge sense of marketing. JSA was a huge success at the Korean Box Office and won lots of Lotus at the Deauville Asian Film Festival. It got even selected at the Festival d'Automne, a parisian festival coorganized by les Cahiers du Cinéma which contributed to the discover of Kurosawa Kiyoshi and Korean cinema in France. The movie gained a certain cult reputation among Asian movie buffs. But is it worth the cult? Not totally. Mainly because Park Chan Wook is not a great director: some of the editing is too fast, some camera moves seem like the ones of an amateur director who would try to film the De Palma way without the talent of the director of Scarface and some heavy sound effects on the bullet impacts. Anyway, JSA works emotionnally. It owes it first to its screenplay : the originality of the movie is being a thriller not looking for the guilty person but for the murder's cause, every revelation adds mystery to the story, some passages about the fascination between North and South Korea are even burlesque, this Cold War movie is more subtle than the US ones. Just like in Shiri, the people are the symbols of a divided country but here there's no useless violence: contrarely to most blockbusters about the consequences of Korea's partition in two, it's more about characters than "trying to compete with Michael Bay" excess of pyrotechnic effects. But another over the top thing is the actors: if the movie is that moving it's thanks to great performances by Byung Heong Lee and Song Kang Ho as the soldiers. And to the humanist message of its end.
