Don't you just love a good disaster movie? It may sound cold, but when it comes to movies, a little schadenfreude never hurt anyone. None of the people in any on-screen danger is real, and audiences rarely, if ever, connect to the vaguely recognizable cardboard cutouts that pass as characters.

Until the emergence of Roland Emmerich, there hadn't been a disaster-obsessed filmmaker worthy of occupying the throne once held by Irwin Allen (Flood!, The Towering Inferno). Odd considering all the new toys producers have to play with. Television took up the mantle briefly in the wake of the 1989 San Francisco earthquake, but that petered out. Sure, James Cameron made Titanic, the mother of all man-made (kind of) disasters, but it was more saccharine love story than orgy of mayhem. Emmerich re-launched the craze with Independence Day, a disaster movie wrapped up as sci-fi, followed quickly by killer asteroids, freakishly powerful volcanoes, and cataclysmic climate change.

So it seems everyone wants in on the renaissance, including the South Koreans. Inspired by the decidedly un-funny tsunami that hit Southeast Asia in 2004, Haeundae director J.K.Youn cooks up a paint-by-numbers story based on some ludicrous science and disaster management about a giant - and I mean giant - tsunami that crashes into the popular beach town an hour from downtown Busan. If you can imagine ten times the number of people crammed onto Repulse Bay Beach on a weekend you'll get an idea of what Haeundae is like on a sweltering July day.

Haeundae was a box office smash at home, not surprising given this was the first film of its kind produced in Korea and the Korean movie-going public will always support home grown talent. However, Koreans may also find humor in the constant barrage of head smacking, name-calling and draconian portrayals of women that other viewers may not - myself included.

If nothing else, Youn (Sex is Zero) proves that he's well studied in the genre. All the stock elements are represented here: Hwi (Park Joong-hoon, Nowhere to Hide) and Yoo-jin (Uhm Jong-hwa, Singles) are bickering ex-spouses with an imperiled child that ultimately reunites them. Naturally, he's a scientist that no one heeds until it's almost too late. There's the requisite "everyman" and his girlfriend, a duo that usually temper the first couple's academic jargon. Here it's fisherman Man-sik (Sul Kyung-gu, Oasis) and Yeon-hee (Ha Ji-won, Love So Divine), a semi-tragic couple with a guilt-laden past. And she's an orphan! That's disaster movie gold. Rounding out the main characters are the doomed Hyung-sik (Lee Min-ki, Oishii Man), an ocean rescue worker, and Hi-mi (Kang Ye-won), the shrill university student from Seoul he falls for. The only missing elements are the endangered pet and a map thrown hastily across a situation room table to illustrate the impending danger. Oh well. Can't win 'em all.

With no real story to work with, everyone's just tanning, fishing, or planning global conferences. Youn moves on to the backgrounders that are supposed to color the main characters and give us something to empathize with. But once again, the mechanical, calculated way everyone is written defeats the purpose. Eok-jo (Song Jae-ho) is a local businessman intent on displacing local shopkeepers with a glitzy mall. Dong-choon (Kim In-kwon) is Man-sik's jealous, petty buddy. Will either find redemption? Will they survive the deluge? Will there be any surprises? Not this time. And Youn gets no help from a uniformly wooden cast; it's very much a case of good actors (Park, Uhm, Sul) slumming it the way Shelley Winters or Paul Newman did in the genre's 70s heyday.

But this is a disaster movie and so it should be rated on its disaster, which can be defined by its dodgy special effects. (To be fair, Haeundae's budget is rumored to be less than 10 percent of 2012, Emmerich's forthcoming $200 million opus.) Haeundae is Titanic without the boat - and without a truly stunning money shot. When the wave finally hits, we see it for all of 10 seconds, and then later moving slowly in the background - so slowly a brisk walk might put one out of harm's way. There's plenty of water (a high point is a flooded street with a live power line threatening to fall into it) but no people to care about. We're meant to bemoan the callousness of the panic-stricken beach bunnies, but their flailing is just kind of amusing. Check out the father struggling to save his daughter from trampling as the wave approaches...Oh! The humanity!

When the Deep Impact moment arrives, there's no sense of pathos to complement it. True, not much is to be expected from formula films like Haeundae, but Cameron managed a few truly moving moments amid the romantic nonsense of Titanic and he didn't disappoint when it came to the ship's sinking. Haeundae lets us down when it comes to the tsunami, ultimately rendering it a disaster movie with no disaster.

Haeundae opened in Hong Kong Thursday.

(HK Edition 09/19/2009 page4)