The Target (2014)

Original title: 표적 (Pyo-jeok)

The life of happily married doctor Lee Tae-joon (Lee Jin-wook) takes a rather dark turn when an unconscious man we will later learn to be called Baek Yeo-hoon (Ryu Seung-ryong) is brought into the hospital he’s working in with a gun shot wound. Someone, or - as it will turn out soon enough - various someones are pretty desperate to get their hands on him. As is police woman Jeong Yeong-joo (Kim Sung-ryung), once reports about a murder come in for which Yeon-hoon is the main suspect. Though there’s another part of the police force under the highly punchable Chief Song (Yu Jun-sang) who want to get their hands on her case exclusively, for some reason surely nobody who has ever watched a thriller will understand.

One of the someones kidnaps Tae-joon’s very pregnant wife Jeong Hee-joo (Cho Yeo-jeong), blackmailing him into smuggling the still unconscious Yeo-hoon out of the hospital. Tae-joon isn’t much of a criminal mastermind, so things could end here rather easily, if Yeo-hoon wouldn’t awaken and take things into his own, rather badass hands. From here on out, the film turns into a series of chases, bad twists of fate and kidnappings, Yeo-hoon and Tae-joon eventually having to team up against the rest of the world, once everybody is clear about who is on whose side.

Yoon Hong-seung’s – also working under the somewhat bizarre pseudonym Director Chang – action thriller is not one of those South Korean examples of the form that start out conventionally only to turn into a very different kind of film during their second or third acts. This one’s made from a series of well-worn genre clichés and barely moves away from them at all except in certain small details, like these: very atypically for a Korean, heck, for any, production, there are three female cops in the movie, two good, one evil, all three portrayed matter of factly as competent and capable; and while Jeong Hee-joo is basically treated as an object for everyone else to do violence over for most of the movie, she does have two little moments when she’s actually allowed to do something. Which doesn’t sound like much, but in the world of the action movie, this sort of thing is not terribly common.

Otherwise, this is really exactly the film you’d expect to watch after the plot description: a couple of melodramatic moments – did I mention Yeo-hoon has a brother with a mental disability, which mixes good with pregnant wives in danger? - sprinkled between lots of action, plot twists the film is clever enough not to try to sell as big surprises, and genre tropes getting hit with clockwork precision. Of course, a genre film following the rules of its genre isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and one might very well go into a genre movie wanting exactly this. Plus, though Yoon may hit only the expected plot beats, he hits them in a very satisfying way. The pacing’s excellent too, with the different character groups converging and diverging with maximum efficiency to keep the film moving as well as always tense, so that there’s really no boring minute here. Even though you see every single plot development coming from a mile filled with a thousand other films in this style away.


As I’m nearly always writing when talking about films from South Korea, the technical standard of filmmaking is as high as expected, Yoon never making the mistake to let the fancy technology he is working with getting in the way of the impact of what the actors and stunt people are doing, so the crazy action movie moments are looking their shiniest (and are actually staged as to be parsable by people not named Michael Bay) yet also have the necessary amount of grit.

In short: Extreme Job (2019)

Original title: 극한직업

Following what is apparently only the most recent in a series of operational mishaps with sees a bus instead of a cop making the arrest of a perp , the merry narcotics division team of long-suffering veteran police captain Go (Ryu Seung-ryong) seem bound for whatever the opposite of glory is for a South Korean cop. It’s not that these guys and gal are particularly mean-spirited or terribly incompetent, much worse, they are a little incompetent and very luckless.

A much younger colleague and arch enemy (obviously coming with a boy band looking team) offers Go what amounts to a final chance to not end up finishing his last years on the job behind a desk (a fate to terrible to contemplate for the man). A well-known felon and probably mid-tier associate of a very big meth dealer has just come out of prison and is now hanging around a place with a bunch of thugs doing nothing. Surely, there’s something going on there that can provide an in into some sort of big criminal operation.

But planning a long-form observation of guys doing not much of anything is a rather difficult thing for these particular cops, so they eventually end up buying the fried chicken restaurant across the (potential) bad guys’ place and do some undercover fry cooking. Turns out these cops are rather better at their pretend job than their actual one, and suddenly the undercover work turns into actual lucrative work. Why, even Go’s wife is now showering when he gets home!

Will our heroes follow the lure of business or keep their cop values intact? Will they accidentally become part of a money laundering business (because clearly, someone here has seen “Breaking Bad”)?

I’ve heard Lee Byeong-heon’s Extreme Job described as an action comedy, but honestly, the film’s  action stays right at the start and the finish of the movie. The largest part of it is concerned with heaping the horrors of sudden unwanted and very unfamiliar success on the broadly drawn but generally fun characters and watching them squirm, while also suggesting that these guys and gals are even unlucky in their successes.

There are a couple of hints at darker elements – Go’s half-beaten personality seems to be the consequence of PTSD following being knifed for example – but the film isn’t interesting in exploring any of this through humour but really prefers to hang around with its characters and tease them a little. So the comedy isn’t particularly deep and incisive, but Extreme Job gets by very well indeed on Lee’s ability to keep the pace up and come up with some new silly business for the characters to scrape against as well as quite a few good jokes about the parallels and differences between the police and the food business with each new scene.


Unlike most comedies involving cops, the whole affair further recommends itself by its general lack of mean-spiritedness, clearly liking its characters too much to be too cruel to them.

Living Death (2009)

aka Possessed

Original title: 불신지옥

One exhausted evening, college student Hee-jin (Nam Sang-mi) gets a call from her mother (Kim Bo-yun) reporting her sister So-jin (Shim Eun-kyung) has disappeared. Hee-jin returns home at once. To her shock, she finds her mother hasn’t called the police about the disappearance yet; dear mother, in the grip of full-on religious mania for what we will later learn quite some time now, really rather wants to pray the kid back.

Of course, once Hee-jin calls the police, she isn’t exactly impressed by the detective she’s speaking with, Tae-hwan (Ryu Seung-ryong). He’s basically shrugging things off by explaining the 14 year-old’s disappearance with her “simply” having run away. Therefore, there’s supposed to be no reason for concern or for the policeman doing his job. However, Tae-hwan will change his tune once a series of strange and disturbing events begin to develop, like a number of suicides in rather quick succession, all taking place in the apartment house Hee-jin’s mother and sister live in. The first woman who kills herself apologizes to So-jin for something in her suicide note, though neither mother nor daughter seem to know what her connection to Hee-jin was apart from having babysat her sometimes. Tae-hwan’s and Hee-jin’s – sometimes independent, sometimes not – investigations turn up increasingly disturbing connections between these people and So-jin.

What these connections in Lee Yong-joo-I’s Living Death exactly are, I’m not going to disclose; I am only going to say that this is one of those horror films where most people getting supernaturally killed off pretty much get what they asked for. Yet, it isn’t the sort of straightforward supernatural tale of vengeance one might expect, for Lee structures the story and its telling very much like a traditional mystery interspersing the investigative sequences with highly effective and often properly disturbing scenes of horror of ever increasing intensity. So this is less a tale of supernatural revenge than that of a young woman and a cop with problems trying to figure out the truth through proper investigations, with interviews and research revealing ever more of the truth of what has been going on around So-jin.

Or really, half revealing that truth, for as many a South Korean horror film, Living Death keeps certain things ambiguous, ending on a note that can be easily read in a couple of very different ways. Which is only right and proper for a film whose characters have very different interpretations on the same set of occurrences and facts, depending on their personal connection to things as well as their religious and spiritual outlook.


Thematically, the film is concerned with the love of family and the sometimes disturbing forms it can take, the horrors of religious world views, the willingness of people to egotistically use others, guilt, and the way fact is always filtered through any given person’s view of the world. It’s pretty heady stuff, at least on paper. In Lee’s hands, however, all these ideas and perspectives come together to form a highly coherent, intelligent film that asks questions and expects its audience to come up with their own answers. It’s also a film that happens to be a fascinating tale of mystery as well as a character based piece of horror that finds its most terrible moments not in the supernatural (though it is certainly no slouch in that regard) but in the human reaction to it.