Citizen of a Kind: Incoming Call, Outgoing Swindler

Everyone knows you don't give out your social security number or your bank account digits or your password codes over the phone. But old people forget. As do people in dire circumstances — like those with a burned-down house and no substantial savings. Citizen of a Kind's Deuk-hee (Ra Mi-ran) falls into this latter category. A homeless mother with two children and no money for daycare or rent, she's scammed on her cell during a shift at the laundromat where she works (and sleeps illegally at night). When she temporarily loses custody of her kids, she's propelled into action to track down the top of the Ponzi scheme: a menacing sadist (Lee Mu-saeng).

How she manages to get to the bucket-hatted mastervillain involves a number of impulsive actions that had my boyfriend going: Why did they do this? Why don't they do that? To which I could only reply, "It's a movie." I'd further add, it's a pretty entertaining one. Under Park Young-ju's direction, Citizen of a Kind propels its heroine through hard-to-resist comedy and hard-to-watch violence without ever feeling forced or flimsy. Basically a chick flick in which one unlucky laundress gets to solve a crime with three gal pals (the uptight Yeom Hye-ran, goofy Jang Yoon-ju, new kid-on-the-block Ahn Eun-jin), this is one feel-good movie with a get-real message: When the real-world woman upon whom this movie is based caught the head swindler, she got neither the promised reward nor an out-of-court settlement. In life, doing the right thing sometimes has to be payoff enough.