A compulsive, unemployed video game player (Ji Chang-wook) gets framed for a murder. Sounds fun! Except Fabricated City also has a nasty prison rape and terrifying jailhouse beatings as well. Too real for you? Well, our falsely convicted young man is a former Tae Kwon Doh champ who can MacGyver a dart-thrower behind bars and protect his pressure points when under assault — as one sympathetic murderer keenly observes. Too preposterous? Okay, then you're really going to recoil when our ill-fated hero gets visited by the dead! As for me, Fabricated City is my kind of movie!
Strategic self-mutilation, ingenious jail-breaks, alternate online identities, intricate crime syndicates, and (finally) a cop who isn't trigger-happy... The juicy details keep piling up, including an adorable black couple who have come to Asia to backpack and bless the fugitive with a "shit car" before getting on a plane for happier trails. Yet for all its gloss, director Park Kwang-Hyun's crime thriller isn't mere escapist fare. Screenwriter Park Myeong-chan — an early collaborator of Park Chan-wook — has crafted a script that's making critical commentary on gender roles, universal surveillance, institutional power, and technology with every twist of its incredibly twisted plot. The final comeuppance is over-the-top, beyond the scope of the believable, even ludicrous, and I wouldn't have it any other way. Fabricated City is a fantasy of retribution (executed by a sweet group of misfits) against all the systems that routinely fail us.
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