Tag: Kim Joon-Bae

Revolver (리볼버, Oh Seung-uk, 2024)

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Everyone is always making promises to Su-yeong, but promises don’t count for very much in this world of infinite duplicity. Reuniting director Oh Seung-uk with The Shameless star Jeon Do-yeon, Revolver (리볼버) takes place in a world of corrupt cops and criminal gangs where no one can be trusted and every relationship is transactional. Like the barrel of a revolver, allegiances shift and rotate as Su-yeong attempts to navigate these turbulent waters while well aware that she is completely alone and has only her quest for vengeance and justice to sustain.

It’s by a broken promise that’s she’s been betrayed. After having become lowkey involved in police corruption to help her lover Captain Lim (Lee Jung-jae), former policewoman Su-yeong agreed to take the fall for the squad. They promised her that she’d only lose her job rather than go to prison and that she’d be allowed to keep the apartment she’d just bought, get a 700,000-dollar payout, and a new job working for Eastern Promises security division. Only in the police station does she realise she’s been tricked as they slap a drug trafficking charge on her and hand down a two-year sentence. Predictably, once she gets out, no one’s there to meet her except a gloating prosecutor and a random woman she’s never met before, Yoon-sun (Lim Ji-yeon), who says she was a friend of Lim’s. He’s since been found dead in a suspected suicide, though that matters less to Su-yeong than the fact he gifted her apartment to someone else and has since died in mysterious circumstances. 

The funny thing is that Yoon-sun, who is working both with corrupt cop Dong-ho (Kim Jun-han) and the gang led by Grace (Jeon Hye-jin), actually has some sympathy with Su-yeong and disproves of the way she’s been treated. After all, they could have just paid her her money like they said they would. Well used to navigating these waters, Yoon-sun appears to be playing her own game and keeping her options open yet it seems genuine when she tries to help Su-yeong which isn’t to say she wouldn’t betray her if she absolutely had to but right now she doesn’t. There is something quite poignant about the sense of female solidarity that arises between them, even though they are romantic rivals, as women who’ve both been let down by this patriarchal society. Su-yeong is rightly fed up with it and she’s going to get her money and her apartment no matter what if only to make sure they don’t win. Yoon-sun has chosen complicity as her chosen means of survival, but may be silently rooting for Su-yeon to break the both of them out of this repressive system.

To that extent it’s ironic that the former detective’s main weapon is a retractable baton, as if she were trying to enact justice though she herself is a compromised figure having at least been on the fringes of the corruption if perhaps not at the heart of it. Then again, all of the police appear to be corrupt so perhaps it’s more that she’s no better than the world that surrounds her and well aware that promises mean nothing and no one can be trusted. Lim seemingly broke a number of promises to her but may have tried to make it right in the end, while she’s also the victim of a vendetta by grudge-bearing cop Dong-ho (Kim Jun-han) whose romantic overtures she once turned down leaving him with a desire to destroy her completely. Top bad guy Andy (Andy) also appears to be a figure of compromised masculinity, playing the rabid dog but having no other backing than his ambiguous relationship with Grace who may have offed a female rival to solidify her grasp over the criminal enterprise. Violently beaten by Su-yeong, he too vows revenge to reclaim his masculinity but is ill equipped to achieve it. 

Despite being disregarded as not a proper detective, Su-yeong patiently follows all the clues and plays a long game to track down the source of all her misery while really her dreams had been small, owning a nice apartment and sharing it with Lim. On her release from prison, she tells the guard that her parents are dead and she has no friends or relatives signalling her aloneness in a vast world of betrayal but also her resilience and refusal to back down in her ironic fight for “justice” which is simply making sure those who’ve wronged her honour their promises and she gets what she’s owed. The occasional bouts of dark humour such as the absurdity of the final confrontation scene lend a touch of surreality to Oh’s purgatorial world of constant mistrust. “Live as if you were already dead,” a defeated Andy ineffectually screams as he vows vengeance and insists Su-yeong hasn’t heard the last of this. But Su-yeong has been living like she’s dead all along and now, finally, might be alive once again. 

Revolver is available digitally in the US courtesy of Well Go USA.

International trailer (English subtitles)

INGtoogi: The Battle of Internet Trolls (잉투기, Um Tae-hwa, 2013)

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A keyboard warrior enters a masculinity crisis after being ambushed in real life and taking a beating from an online rival in Um Tae-hwa’s graduation film, Ingtoogi: The Battle of the Internet Trolls (잉투기, Ingtoogi). Though the title may promise something more like a slacker comedy, Um subtly hints at the loserville of the contemporary Korean society which is, as the hero’s mother suggests, “only for the select few” leaving men like Tae-sik (Uhm Tae-goo), in contrast to the film’s title, losing the will to fight.

20-something and unemployed, Tae-sik still lives at home with his mother and fills his life with online fighting games. Lured to a park on the pretext of selling an online game item, Tae-sik is unexpectedly attacked by fellow gamer ManBoobs and becomes a laughing stock for getting beaten up in the street. Vowing revenge, Tae-sik makes his way to a mixed martial arts gym named Ingtoogi which as the coach explains means “we’re still fighting” and begins training in preparation to publicly call out Man Boobs for a fair fight on safer ground.

But Tae-sik is now traumatised and has become frightened of everything, hallucinating being punched in the face and in fact afraid of getting hit. It’s this sense of fear along with his wounded masculinity that he’s trying to avenge through violence and male dominance, but in order to do so has to resort to carrying around a kitchen knife as rather phallic replacement for his fractured manhood while otherwise trained by an equally disaffected teenage girl herself a former mixed martial arts champion.

Young-ja’s (Ryu Hye-young) high school class is perhaps surprisingly asked to debate capitalism in broadly positive terms only for her best friend to shock her by giving a detailed, text book answer about the loss of individuality later explaining that her nagging mother bribed the teacher to get the topic in advance so she could prepare. Young-ja is an orphan living alone though watched over by her martial arts expert uncle, Wook, but Tae-sik too has a nagging mother who is particularly disappointed in him for embarrassing himself by getting beaten up and going viral online. She wants to emigrate to Costa Rica vowing that it’s too hard to live in Korean society which is only for the elites. Tae-sik has no desire to move and in a pointed criticism states that though he and his mother live in the same space he does not feel as if they “live together” suggesting that the demands of contemporary capitalism and her job as an estate agent have placed a divide between them.

Indeed, when she suggests that Tae-sik learn the trade from her she in fact ends up in a physical altercation with a homeowner that is observed by the entire neighbourhood just standing and watching much as they’d watched Tae-sik getting beaten up online. The film seems keen to present his generation as one already beaten into submission and retreating behind the shield of their computer screens rather than taking risks in real life while those like Man Boobs who is later revealed to have been suffering with poor mental health are perhaps looking for something more “real” offline but have few ways to express themselves outside of violence. Even Man Boobs’ friend who set up the attack and filmed it is revealed to be a failed boy band star whose bid for fame in a capitalist society has crashed and burned leaving him with nothing. 

Yet for all that Tae-sik and his friend Hee-jun (Kwon Yul) who learns to take his knocks faster are fairly skeevy each attempting to ask out the teenage Young-ja despite being in their 20s, Hee-jun following up on a tip off from one of the other “loser” fighters about how to set up a date to take advantage of girl. Far from overcoming his powerlessness, what Tae-sik has to get used to is being beaten and effectively accept his “loserdom” if continuing a futile attempt to fight his dismal circumstances by less than productive means in simply not giving in and grinning through the blood no matter how many knocks he takes. The inane insults of online commenters present themselves as a kind of Greek chorus enshrouding Tae-sik in his self-loathing and powerlessness but do so only as a means of masking their own, ranting against the darkness from the comparative safety of their anonymous online personas. Though underlined by a quiet irony, Um paints a bleak picture of the contemporary city in which masochistic violence has become the only escape from an oppressive society.

INGtoogi: The Battle of Internet Trolls screened as part of this year’s London Korean Film Festival.

Trailer (English subtitles)