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James Marsh

1/5 stars
Korean superstar Song Joong-ki jets off on his latest international adventure in director Kim Seong-je’s exasperating Bogota: City of the Lost.
The film chronicles the transformation of an impoverished Korean immigrant into a Colombian crime lord, but is painfully devoid of both crime and drama.
The long-delayed production opened to a muted reception at the 2024 Busan International Film Festival, while its future beyond the festival seems desperately uncertain.


After jaunts in Italy (for the K-drama series Vincenzo) and Belgium (for My Name is Loh Kiwan), Song now heads for South America, butchering another foreign language in the process.
Set in the wake of the IMF crisis that ravaged the Korean economy in the late 1990s and left many ordinary citizens destitute, Bogota sees 19-year-old Kook-hee (Song) arrive in the Colombian capital with his parents looking to start afresh.
Almost immediately they are robbed of their life savings and forced to claw their way up from the proverbial gutter. Kook-hee’s father (Kim Jong-soo) looks up an old Vietnam war buddy, Sergeant Park (Kwon Hae-hyo), who has carved out a niche for himself in the garment trading industry.
Instead of hiring Kook-hee’s father, however, Park’s boss favours the fresh-faced youngster.
In no time, “Cookie”, as he is called by the locals, picks up the language and gets to grips with the black market, navigating shady deals with customs officers and other nefarious underworld types along the way.

Cookie’s ascension through the ranks of Park’s criminal empire is not looked upon favourably by everyone in the organisation, particularly Lil Park (Park Ji-hwan) and Soo-young (Lee Hee-joon), both of whom see their own course to the top threatened by the precocious youngster.
At the same time, Cookie’s father spirals into drug use and abandons his family.
The problems with Bogota are plentiful and severe. Foremost, great effort seems to have gone into shooting on location in Colombia, with the support of the Colombian Film Commission, but the film fails spectacularly in capturing the essence of this inherently exotic, sensual and dangerous environment.
The cinematography is flat, while there are almost no Colombian nor female characters to speak of, lending the endeavour a painfully neutered and inert sensibility.
Kook-hee is a vapid shell of a protagonist, earning neither sympathy nor disdain from the audience during his despotic rise, while the only other memorable character is his rival, Soo-young, mostly because he sports a moustache.


Perhaps most unbelievably of all, Bogota attempts to tell a crime saga set in Colombia without dealing in narcotics.
The childish “drugs are bad” messaging is as naive as it is clumsy, but serves as a fitting metaphor for this entire venture: eager to emulate a seductive and successful formula without daring to actually get its hands dirty.
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Lee Hee-joon (left) and Song Joong-ki in a still from Bogota: City of the Lost. Photo: Plus M Entertainment and Watermelon Pictures Co., Ltd

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Kwon Hae-hyo (left) and Song Joong-ki in a still from Bogota: City of the Lost. Photo: Plus M Entertainment and Watermelon Pictures

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Song Joong-ki stars as an immigrant who becomes a Colombian crime lord in Korean movie Bogota: City of the Lost, a one-star waste of time


Song Joong-ki stars as an immigrant who becomes a Colombian crime lord in Korean movie Bogota: City of the Lost, a one-star waste of time.


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.css-1c6uqr6{color:inherit;font-weight:inherit;font-size:inherit;font-family:inherit;line-height:inherit;overflow-wrap:break-word;}Song Joong-ki stars as an immigrant who becomes a Colombian crime lord in Korean movie Bogota: City of the Lost, a one-star waste of time

Song Joong-ki stars as an immigrant who becomes a Colombian crime lord in Korean movie Bogota: City of the Lost, a one-star waste of time