A Taxi Driver

The film centers around the Gwangju Uprising that occurred from May 18, 1980 to May 27, 1980 and it is estimated to have led to 2,000 people being killed. The plot in the film mirrors the historical background of the Gwangju Uprisings.

The Gwangju Uprising was a result of a continuous power tug-of-war between the government and the citizens of South Korea – mainly college students – that were advocating for democracy.[11]

For many years, Gwangju’s Uprising was a forbidden term in South Korea – those who were on the side of the government during that time held the reins of nation. According to scholar Jang Se Young from the Wilson Center, "books related to Gwangju were strictly censored or prohibited from even being published. Although a number of political dissidents and activists sought to inherit and develop the spirit of Gwangju, they were persecuted."[12] Scholar Kim Yong Cheol stated, "the political legacies the Gwangju Uprising produced played a pivotal role in checking military intervention in politics during the democratic transition as well as in establishing the principle of civilian supremacy during the democratic transition period."[13] Despite being banned, hundreds and thousands of news articles on what was happening in Gwangju were trying to be released by some of the journalists inside the city.[13]

Efforts were made by some American journalists in order to inform the world about what was happening in Gwangju. Tim Shorrock published numerous US government documents related to the uprisings that were happening in Gwangju, and Terry Anderson, who was a former AP correspondent, covered the uprisings himself and provided an eyewitness account of the situation in 1980.[14] People in Seoul were not aware of what was happening in Gwangju, until international media took hold of the story.[15] Andrew David Jackson of Cambridge University argued that Jürgen Hinzpeter's relationship with South Korea's democratization movement "have become important weapons for the activist generation in an ongoing struggle over the memorialization of the Gwangju Uprising."[14]

Candlelight protests through the fall and winter of 2016-17 marked the thirtieth year of significant democratic advancement in South Korean history, compared to the setting in which A Taxi Driver took place.[16] Harvard sociology professor Paul Y. Chang argued in 2018 in KOAJ that "the contemporary candlelight protest industry draws on organizational and cultural resources first established in past democracy movements."[16] During the filming of the movie, the director Jang Hoon was stopped multiple times, and the main actor of this film, Song Kang Ho, was blacklisted by the government from appearing on major motion picture films.[15] Similar to the past, where newspaper articles and mass media coverage in South Korea was heavily monitored and censored, this movie faced obstacles as it reached its release date due to the former government’s implications.[17]

• Song Kang-ho as Kim Man-seob

A widowed taxi driver who lives with his eleven year old daughter in a small house. He is an ordinary man from the working class who cares only about his family's livelihood and is uninterested in political issues.[18] The character is loosely based on real-life taxi driver Kim Sa-bok, who ferried Jürgen Hinzpeter to Gwangju. Kim's whereabouts was unknown until the release of A Taxi Driver,[19] when in September 2017, following the immense commercial and critical success of the film in South Korea, Kim's identity was finally confirmed by his son, Kim Seung-pil. The younger Kim shared with the media a photo of Jürgen Hinzpeter with his father and revealed that his father died of cancer in 1984, four years after the Gwangju events.[20] Kim Sa-bok was reportedly 54 years old at the time of his death in December 1984.[21]

• Thomas Kretschmann as Jürgen Hinzpeter

A German reporter. The character is based on the life of Jürgen Hinzpeter (1937–2016), the German journalist who filmed and reported on the Gwangju Uprising.[22]

• Yoo Hae-jin as Hwang Tae-sool

A kindhearted local taxi driver.

• Ryu Jun-yeol as Gu Jae-sik

A naive university student who knows English.

• Ko Chang-seok as Sang-goo's father
• Jeon Hye-jin as Sang-goo's mother
• Jung Jin-young as Reporter Lee
• Ryu Tae-ho as Gwangju newspaper director
• Jeong Seok-yong as President of car center in Seoul

A Taxi Driver received positive reviews upon its release. The review aggregation website Rotten Tomatoes gives the film an approval rating of 96% based on 28 reviews, with an average rating of 7.3/10. The website's critical consensus reads "A Taxi Driver brings a ground-level perspective and a refreshingly light touch to a fact-based story with sobering implications."[lower-alpha 1] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating based on reviews, the film has a score of 69 out of 100, based on 7 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".[lower-alpha 2]

Sohing Yi Chan of Off Screen pointed out A Taxi Driver "as a film depicting a historical trauma", let the international audience, especially those who were not familiar with the event, be able to learn more about the truth.[33] He also suggested that the film by adopting a classical Hollywood structure in narrative, gave audiences a chance to "experience the roller coaster of emotions that the film bombards the audience within a highly workmanlike fashion".[34]

Jennie Kermode of Eye For Film shared the relevant ideas that the director didn’t ignore the peaceful and lovely moments besides the violent, panic and horrible scenes, and it created a contrast in emotion and let audience keep shocking or plunge into consideration.[35]

The cinematography in this film gained some more attention. Sheri Linden of The Hollywood Reporter went further that especially in the checkpoint scene and the mountain-road chase scene, the cinematography captured a "metal-on-metal violence" which was exaggerated in a "pastoral backdrop" that made Kim’s decision and reaction more convincing.[36] Sheri Linden also refuted the doubt on the other character Hinzpeter that his emotions might be overplayed in the last act, by evidencing the found footage from the real Hinzpeter by the end of the film, to show the proper performance in the film.[36]

Some people have pointed out the formulaic elements and the weakness they brought to the film. Manfred Selzer of Asian Movie Web argued due to the heavy use of slow-motion, repetitions and soundtrack, some scenes of killing seemed too melodramatic; and the exciting scenes that the taxi chasing on mountain road although were some wonderful action scenes, did not work on well with the narrative, which seemed "out of place in the film and aren’t captured that convincing either".[37]

Simon Abrams of RogerEbert.com argued that Peter was depicted as a stiff supporting role to work for the narrative rather than a vivid character in the story, and each peak moment "feels too neat and schematic" that couldn’t evoke sincere emotion.[38] Sohing Yin Chan, in his review, questioned whether the emotional wave based on the balanced narrative made between drama and action genre could squeeze the audience’s tear in ethical way; he also believed those emotion are "too detached from all the action."[34]

According to the Korean Film Council, on the first day of the release, a total of 698,090 tickets were sold, which earned US$4.5 million.[39] The film was available on 1,446 screens and was shown 7,068 times across South Korea.[40] By noon on the second day of its run, the film had passed the one million viewer mark.[41]

On the third day, the total audience doubled, attracting two million viewers.[42] The viewer numbers continued to rise as the tickets sale increased to four million by the fourth day.[43][44]

A Taxi Driver has earned a total of US$30.7 million in five days with 4.38 million admissions.[45][46] It has tied with The Admiral: Roaring Currents and The Battleship Island for the record of films which have surpassed four million viewers in the first five days of release. At the end of the first seven days, the film surpassed 5 million admissions.[47][48] On the eleventh day since the opening the film recorded more than 7 million viewers.[49]

A Taxi Driver became the most viewed South Korean film in 2017 in less than two weeks since its premiere by attracting more than 8 million audience.[50][51] By August 15, 2017, it has earned a total of US$62.7 million with 9.02 million admissions.[52]

By August 20, in just 19 days since the film was released, A Taxi Driver surpassed 10 million viewers selling 10,068,708 tickets,[53] earning a total of US$73 million.[54][55] A Taxi Driver also became the first film of 2017 and the fifteenth Korean film overall to surpass the 10 million milestone. It is also Song Kang-ho's third film to have sold more than 10 million tickets.[56]

The film topped the South Korean box office for three consecutive weekends. By August 28, the film had attracted 11.4 million viewers.[57] According to the film's distributor Showbox, the total attendance of the film surpassed the 12 million mark as of September 9, becoming the tenth most-watched local film of all time in South Korea.[58]

A Taxi Driver is yet to be released in any form in China, though it received a theatrical release on September 21, 2017 in Hong Kong. The film has received warm responses from users on Chinese movie website Douban, where it had a high user rating.[59] However at around 21:10, October 3, 2017, the film was entirely removed from the Chinese movie portal, the reason possibly being that a number of reviews had compared the film's content to the 1989 Tiananmen Square protests and massacre, which is strictly censored on media in China.[60]