Don't Buy the Seller: Target

I'm really enjoying these identity theft movies coming out of South Korea right now. Citizen of a Kind (2024) pits an energetic factory worker against a Chinese scam syndicate; Unlocked (2023) finds a spyware expert moonlighting as a serial killer; and now, Don't Buy the Seller (2023) turns Craigslist secondhand shoppers into easy targets for bloodthirsty hackers. All are B-movies that you can't easily disregard because they're dealing with our now-universal fear of losing control of our lives via our phones. Don't Buy the Seller may not go as far as as the terrorized set-up in Call (2020) with its supernatural elements but maybe that's why this movie works. Identity theft, cyberbullying and cybertheft are scary enough without cyberspirits.

My one gripe with Park Hee-kon's dial-a-doom is that its heroine (Shin Hye-sun) starts off as a savvy young woman unwilling to take flack from her harrasser and diligent enough to track him down online. But when her cyberstalker pranks her then hunts her, she loses her autonomy completely. Don't we all hate when a Final Girl stands to the side while the hero-detective (Kim Seong-gyoon) gets the hell beaten out of him by her tormentor (Im Sung-jae), simply as a cliched plot point. How long does it take to find the nailgun or a plank with a nail in it or a shard of glass? I guess long enough to drag the scene out to justify a feature-length movie.

Title Variations: This film is also known as Target.

Insadong Scandal: Beyond the Bechdel Test

The art-forgery caper Insadong Scandal definitely doesn't pass the Bechdel test. Not only are there no conversations between two women that don't have to do with men. There aren't any conversations between two women at all. But the movie does have three fun female characters — a ruthless gallerist (Eom Jeong-hwa), an unrelenting police detective (Hong Soo-hyun) and a leather-clad gangster (Choi Song-hyeon) — that in another movie, would easily have been cast as men. For that I thank writer-director Park Hee-kon. He's at least creating strong roles for women. I'm less appreciative of his writing for men and his casting of the actors who play them.

As the duplicitous master restorer who turns everyone's life upside down, Kim Rae-won looks like he's modeling clothes when he's supposedly copying famous paintings. He's the type of performer who feels most natural when he's singing karaoke and who's most likable when he's getting slugged. Jeong Jin plays an auctioneer with a perm that looks like a joke that can't get a single laugh. As to journeyman actors Kim Byung-ok and Kim Jeong-tae — as sidekicks of good and evil — they're both on automatic pilot. You can bet they spent their time in their trailers reading scripts for other projects with more lines and less cliches. The best of the guys is probably Lim Ha-ryong, a bad-guy-turned-good who has a long monologue on the art of forgery that is definitely the most educational part of the movie.

Not that you'll leave Insadong Scandal truly informed about anything. The one thing I learned after viewing the movie is that Insadong is actually the gallery district of Seoul — the Soho of yore, the Chelsea of now. It in no way felt like a modern day Williamsburg. Eom's high-end wardrobe is a Fashion Week runway of clingy pleasures and there's not a single hipster in sight.