South Korean creature feature, a tad overlong and a bit wavery in tone, yet very well made on the whole, and especially well made in its computer-animated creature, a two-legged, amphibious, carnivorous, whale-scale fish, with a toothy Venus-flytrap mouth. (Blame it on the Americans, Scott Wilson specifically, dumping toxic chemicals from a U.S. Army base into the Han River.) The first sight of the beast, hanging batlike from the underside of a bridge, is as real as unreal can be; and director Joon-ho Bong mixes up a marvelous variety of views of the thing, far enough in the squinty distance to defy belief, and close as an express subway hurtling past the platform a few feet in front of your face. The shot of the beast vomiting up a pile of bones in its sewer lair is a certifiable highlight. There are curious touches of pratfall comedy, from which the fish itself is not immune, slipping and rolling on unsteady land legs. And the narrow focus on one family's search for a carried-off little girl (there's scant evidence of a widespread hunt for the monster) threatens the movie continually with sentimentality, and at the end, when all surviving family members must get in on the act, threatens it with silliness. You might wish you could take the movie a little more seriously, but you can be quite content to take it playfully. Kang-ho Song, Hae-il Park, Doo-na Bae, A-sung Ko. (2006) — Duncan Shepherd