People are saying that Song Joong-ki is a fading star. For K-drama fans, that’s heartbreaking. Most fans remember him as Vincenzo (2021) or Jin Do-jun from Reborn Rich (2022). But lately, all his films and series have managed to flop one by one.
Bogotá: City of the Lost (2024) is one of the latest in this streak. Its Korean title is 보고타: 마지막 기회의 땅 (Bogota: Majimag Gihuie Tang). Probably, the only reason people would ever want to watch it is because it has Song Joong-ki. It is also his last film to date. And quite visibly, he has been typecast into the role of a mafia underdog once again—who rises to power. In a nutshell, that is the entire plot in one sentence.
The underworld drama is set in Colombia. But the starting point of the story is 1997. Reborn Rich too has partly covered the Korean crisis that year. Lately, Typhoon Family (2025) also dealt with it, far more successfully. So, the subject matter is not really new to the audience. Except, very few have previously covered the Koreans who left their country at that time.
The Korean Immigrants
While critics have largely bashed the film, it does have a rather unfamiliar background. Koreans are rarely shown as immigrants on screen. But here, the story starts with Koreans immigrating after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis hits their homeland.
One can tell stories of immigrants from so many different viewpoints. But in Bogotá: City of the Lost, it seems like almost all Koreans are smugglers. The story speaks of a time when Koreans too were ‘unwanted illegals’, just like many of their less fortunate Asian counterparts.
The film’s strongest point is probably touching upon this subject aptly. Song Joong-ki plays Guk-hee, a teenage boy who arrives in Colombia with his family. They are robbed on the very first day in the new country. Guk-hee chases the hitman who was riding a motorcycle and reaches downtown. At this point, the camera leads to a semi-bird’s-eye view of the city. With disbelief, Guk-hee watches his new home: a dirty country.
Throughout the story, he’d appear often running, often passing through the Colombian military checkposts in multiple smuggling operations—one after another. Until the day he hits the jackpot himself. But even after that, he’d face threats of losing everything when the Colombian authorities attempt to crack down on illegally sold Korean goods.
Towards the end, there is a scene where a bulldozer is destroying the Korean market. It is somewhat familiar to many ‘third world’ Asians, who’ve seen it over and over again. Authorities often round up immigrants from poorer, less fortunate Asian countries in detention centers and forcibly send them back home. Anyone would imagine that is a thing of the past for Koreans. But the story does touch upon it a number of times.
It misses many more things. But as much as a crime drama in the mainstream would show, it did.
The Crime Paradise
Bogotá is the capital of Colombia. For some Colombians in the industry, the film served as part of their attempt to ‘put Colombia on the map’. The international audience knows very little about the country.
The film portrays it as a crime paradise, where hitmen run wild on motorbikes, hijacking and often murdering people. The entire atmosphere shown fits only the description of a mafia paradise.
There are six zones in the city. Colombians call them “Estratos” in Spanish.Zone 1 houses the poorest residents, and Zone 6 the richest. This is a very real, existing system in the country that came up in the film. Guk-hee’s goal is to reach Zone 6, which he manages to attain in the last half of the film.
Other than that, there are people being mugged on the street randomly, held at gunpoint by hijackers and hooligans waving their pistols in the air with occasional blank fires.
It does not show anything else about Colombian culture. Not even as a reference. This is all there is to it, which makes it disappointing. When it faintly touches on the divide in the city, it doesn’t have much to say about capitalism—which is the root cause why all of this is happening.
The film portrays very few Colombians. It does show two Colombian actresses, Juana del Río and Cristal Aparicio—in rather unmemorable roles. But overall, the audience doesn’t really get exposure to Colombia’s culture. Like many other mainstream films, it too simply chooses a city to film a mafia story and leaves it at that.
Except, of course, all the Korean characters portrayed are criminals themselves.
Song Joong-ki and the other actors
The film’s primary charm lies in Song Joong-ki, who played very similar characters in his last few projects, including Hopeless (2023). But that is almost all there is to it. And this is why critics called it a ‘one-star waste’.
But he has delivered in his role. He is absolutely believable as a teenager in the beginning scenes, just as much as the adult mafia tycoon years later in the last half.
While Bogotá: City of the Lost is obviously a very wrong choice, he’s been making all the wrong choices lately. Critics heavily panned his latest K-drama, My Youth (2025), as well.
Kwon Hae-hyo and Lee Hee-joon did well in their supporting roles, too. Though they are not the ones who’d drag the audience. It is still charming to see Joong-ki transform into the many stages of his character until the end of the movie.
Very noticeably, the film does not have any women in the lead roles. The director, Kim Seong-je, does not have many remarkable projects in his profile, either.
Bogotá: City of the Lost is a very average attempt at making a mafia movie, one which berates a country and somewhat racializes its people to a certain extent. It re-employs the tired stereotypes of Latin America, which usually always show Latin American people as mostly criminals.
As expected, a mainstream movie venture would not care much about that. But at the same time, it can be said about the Colombians who worked on the film as well. Standing today, when Trump has abducted the Venezuelan president, Maduro, one might feel even more disheartened with the presentations of Latin America on screen.
Still, for Song Joong-ki lovers, it is a decent enough movie—not unwatchable at all, though many might choose to skip it.
