Park Joong-hoon in Hollywood Movie `the Truth about Charlie`

`The Truth about Charlie` is a remake of the 1963 `Charade` by director Jonathan Demme, who is well known for his Academy Award-winning `the Silence of the Lambs.` Carry Grant and Audrey Hapburn were starring in the 1963 original. The movie adopts a completed plot filled with twists and turns, and the audience find themselves too busy looking for the truth about Charlie.

Antique dealer Regina Lambert (Thandie Newton) contemplates ending her marriage to her husband Charlie who is often on business trips. Upon her return from vacationing, she finds that her husband was murdered and he was using false names such as Charles, Charlie and Carlo. Then Joshua (Mark Warlberg) appears mysteriously and hangs around her, ready to offer any help he can.

A trio of her husband`s old cohorts (Joong-Hoon Park, Ted Levine, Lisa Gay Hamilton) has also begun shadowing her in hopes of answering their own questions about Charlie and recovering $6 million-worth missing diamonds. Regina, not knowing what has happened, begins to search for the truth about her dead husband using his memo book.

The movie is filled with twists and turns until the very end when Joshua kindly explains what has happened. The audience, watching the too complicated story, gives up finding the truth about Charlie in the early part and sees the dramatic reverse in the end hardly interesting.

It is soothing, however, to see Park Joong-hoon play a key role in a Hollywood movie for the first time as a Korean actor.

Park, being a less than main character, speaks good English and does good acts. Demme cast Park after seeing him in `Nowhere to Hide.` He also made the scene where Park and Warlberg fight at the back ally in pouring rain, which was also in `Nowhere to Hide.` For aged 12 and over. Released on Jan. 10.

Soo-Kyung Kim skkim@donga.com