Night in Paradise: The Writer's Gang

One of the advantages of having the screenwriter direct is you will avoid unnecessary improvements to the script such as having the male and female leads tongue or having the good guy emerge complete victor whatever the odds. Park Hoon-jung (I Saw the Devil, The Witch - Part 1) is a master of subverting formula in genre films. Here he's taken a classic jopok scenario — the little guy against the mob — and given it plenty of satisfying twists and turns involving a terminally ill sharpshooter (Jeon Yeo-bin) who never so much as kisses the underdog thug (Eom Tae-goo) who finds himself fighting not one gang, but two.

What he's got is character-driven tension. As for the fight scenes, they're brutal in a way that's strangely pretty. Consider the hero's face which, though covered in blood, has the whitest full-toothed smile possible. Yet if you fault Night in Paradise for not being gritty enough, you'd be overlooking its many pleasures — its thrilling propulsion, its innate sense of justice, its upholding of a Korean cinematic tradition that insists that women are bad-asses, too. Throw in strong performances from Lee Moon-sik as a cop with a shit-eating grin and Hyun Bong-sik as a gun-seller who a single stab can't kill and you've got the makings for some pleasurable pulp. It may not be a brilliant movie but flicks like this are why I started Korean Grindhouse in the first place. Mad respect.