October 25, 2021

The Swindlers: Worth the Wait

For awhile now, The Swindlers has been appearing whenever I narrow my Korean movie search results on Amazon down to those films rating four stars and up. Because of that, I've tried streaming this 2017 crime pic a few times before. Sadly I've never made it past the first 20 minutes. Every time I'd learn that a Ponzi scheme had left numerous people broke and driven a few to suicide. Then I'd fall asleep. I just couldn't give a hoot. Last night, I decided to stay awake and find out how this thriller could possibly merit 4.6 stars. Would Jang Chang-won's directorial debut improve if I hunkered down and stuck it out?

Yes. It does. The Swindlers improbably evolves from terminally boring to deliciously exciting. A cat and mouse game that keeps changing whose the cat and whose the mouse, the cleverly crafted plot leaves you secondguessing the young mastercrook (Hyun Bin) and the aspirational prosecutor (Yoo Ji-tae) as they keep turning the tables on each other while trying to nab the Grand Poobah of Ponzi. What they lose sight of, however, is the movie's sole con woman played by Nana. She steals the movie despite second billing. Never underestimate an underdog.

October 4, 2021

The Culprit: He Did It! She Did It!

Watching Ko Jung-wook's whodunit The Culprit, it occurred to me: A movie can't be film noir if the actors are screaming all the time. Noir implies a sense of cool; it's an attitude as well as a genre. So having your two main actors constantly running their voices ragged as they feed each other's hysteria is going to disqualify you a thriller's highest label. Noisy noir simply isn't a thing. What's all the shouting about? Yeong-hoon (Song Sae-byeok) wants to find out who killed his wife! Jeong Da-yeon (Yoo Sun) wants to get her baby daddy (Oh Min-seok) out of jail. And Park Sang-Min (Jang Hyuk-jin) wants someone, anyone to remove the duct tape off his mouth and his wrists and his ankles in the recreated crime scene the widowed husband has made.

I'd say each has a perfectly legitimate reason to scream, especially the hostage, but these three probably could've discovered who the killer is with appropriate indoor voices. (Why none of the neighbors in this apartment building call the cops may be this movie's greatest mystery.) Now that I think about it, one of the few people who doesn't scream is the murder victim. A guilty conscience can really shut you up. But only if you're crime is adultery, not homocide. Cheating is so much worse than stabbing. Or so The Culprit implies.