Here we have one of the most uncompelling movies in recent memory, wrapped up in a visual style that's needlessly confusing and weighted down with performances that have all the flavor of a loaf of unbaked bread. Yesterday is not the worst of many recent Korean SF flop-busters—the all-time loser in that regard is the lamentable Resurrection of the Little Match Girl—but it's quite a tiresome mess unto itself. It’s so excruciatingly uninvolving that it took three separate sittings for me to watch the whole thing, making a two-hour movie feel like four.
Yesterday is like one of those Movie-By-Numbers jobs, where the ingredients are all there but the flair of the chef is missing. It contains a great many things—serial killers, genetic experiments, futuristic police work—but they all just sort of sit there. They never gel into a reason to keep watching. Plus, there's a fight or chase every ten minutes just to keep the audience awake—the sort of thing that in a better movie would work as punctuation but here is more like stammering.
