The Korean movie “Typhoon”, which opens today, is a landmark achievement. It’s the most expensive movie in Korean history, the technical high point of a resurgent national cinema, and the first sign of a potential renaissance in foreign film distribution in America. It’s also a really bad movie.

“Typhoon” has no American distributor. CJ Entertainment, its producer, is the largest film company in South Korea and they’ve been annoyed that their hit movies have either been ignored by American distributors, or received only a token release. So they’ve dipped into their considerable cash reserves and skipped the middleman, releasing “Typhoon” in the U.S. themselves, with Paramount tapped to handle the logistics on the ground.

This is the culmination of Asia’s growing discontent with Hollywood. America is a one-way street for movies: We export them by the truckload but import almost nothing. Out of the 90 movies submitted for the Best Foreign Film Oscar in 2005 only seven had American distribution, and in 2005 only 10 foreign language films broke the $1 million barrier at the box office.

Foreign distributors have spent years watching their major blockbusters sell for relative peanuts to U.S. studios because there is no market for foreign films in America, even though the rest of the world loves them. Korean, Thai, and Japanese movies play across Asia and Europe, raking in money and making their studios rich. Korea, which has spent the last eight years building up its film industry from almost nothing, is now one of the world’s leading film producers.

And Hollywood is concerned. The Motion Picture Association of America has lobbied hard against screen quota systems and tax subsidies awarded by local governments to protect their domestic film industries. But it’s a losing battle. Every country in the world except America and Israel recently signed the UNESCO Convention on Cultural Diversity, a treaty that gives countries the right to opt out of free trade agreements where cultural products like movies are concerned. At Cannes this year, Western distributors were heard complaining that they couldn’t sell their movies to Asian buyers for the first time in decades. Korea’s cinemas are booked through the end of the year with Asian product and Korean film crews are even borrowing cameras from Japan to keep up with the number of movies they’re making.

And so it’s doubly depressing that the vanguard of the new Asian wave is “Typhoon.” It is empty-headed international action junk about a Korean pirate, Sin, who is planning to use a typhoon to release dirty bombs across Korea and wipe out the population. Kang, a Navy lieutenant, is assigned to stop him. The two proceed to shoot at each other in Russia, China, and Thailand.

There’s nothing new here, but the uniquely Korean qualities of “Typhoon” will be novel to most Americans. The visuals are deeply accomplished and the film is far more concerned with why Sin wants everyone dead, rather than how he’s going to do it. His motives are unraveled in a compelling series of flashbacks and the family melodrama that bubbles up is the best thing in the movie. Otherwise it’s just a big, loud dud.

Dozens of better movies came out of Korea last year, many produced by CJ, and “Typhoon” bombed big when it was released. So it’s a bit insulting to have Korea’s brain-dead action trash pawned off on us whether we like it or not. Then again, we’ve been pawning our brain-dead action trash off on Korea for decades. Now they’re just in a position to return the favor.