“Luck” is a funny thing. You might think you’ve come out on top, only to realise that perhaps you haven’t been quite so lucky after all. Choi Kook-hee’s Tazza: The Song of Beelzebub (타짜: 벨제붑의 노래, Tazza: Beelzebubui Norae) is the latest instalment in the thematic series that began with 2006 manwha adaptation Tazza: The High Rollers, though otherwise a stand-alone tale. This time around, gambling is more a means of revenge as two men, who are in effect two sides of the same coin, find their roles constantly reversed.
Indeed ParkTae (Roh Jae-Won) characterises them as Beelzebub and Lucifer vying for control with Beelzebub the apparent loser. He and JangTae (Byun Yo-Han), who each share the name Taeyoung, met in high school and became friends, though ParkTae came to resent JangTae for apparently having charmed luck in which everything seemed to go his way and he always came out on top. The boys develop a shared love of gambling, but ParkTae is experiencing a difficult home life in which his mother is a religious fanatic who seems to have an alcohol problem. She regularly beats him with a crucifix and refers to him as the antichrist, which perhaps fuels his characterisation of himself as Lucifer. JangTae, meanwhile, has lost both his parents but shares a warm familial environment with his older sister Tae-hee (Lim Se-Mi). They later take in ParkTae too, but he soon develops unreturned feelings for Tae-hee that see him almost long to push JangTae out of the next.
Filled with self-loathing, ParkTae sees himself as unlucky and feels hard done by, resentful of the ease with which JangTae seems to live his life and what he sees as the way JangTae’s “luck” often ends up making him look foolish. ParkTae seems to be the more the rational side of the crypto casino business the guys start together while JangTae is readier to make decisions on gut instinct. JangTae later asks him if it wasn’t ParkTae who was the lucky one all along. He was smart, talented, and had people who loved him, though he was too consumed with resentment to notice. While the guileless JangTae only offered him support and friendship, ParkTae dreamed of ruling alone and taking the entire prize for himself.
That might be why he sets up a honeytrap with the help of Korean American lobbyist Linda Park (Stephanie Lee) who’s supposedly agreed to give them the lowdown on how to clear the way for a physical casino in Vietnam. JangTae has to bet his life on the toss of coin where both sides spell death only to find himself lucky once again when it somehow ends up standing on edge. Taken in by a former card sharp hiding out in Vietnam (Jo Woo-Jin), JangTae is co-opted into another battle for revenge in which a young woman (Ayaka Miyoshi) plots against the man who shot her father (Tsuyoshi Ihara) who foolishly bet his life after getting too into a poker game. The lure of odds seems to drive men mad with each begging for just one more game to turn it all around. It is, however, a battle of wits as much as anything else in which the pair engage in a kind of psychological warfare over the gaming table.
As JangTae says, maybe ParkTae was always luckier than he was. He just isn’t able to see why a particular outcome benefits him while fixating on winning or being a conventional success. ParkTae wants to knock JangTae off his perch to satisfy his ego, but cannot shake his inferiority complex and attributes all his shortcomings to his unluckiness rather than accept the consequences of his own actions. As JangTae’s mentor taught him, the luckiest man at the table is the one who knows when to walk away. That’s something that seems to have eluded ParkTae who doesn’t know when to quit when he’s ahead. Rather, he fixates on his chosen income unable to see clear where real “luck” lies. In any case, the dynamics between the two men are continually in shift as they find themselves quite literally staking their lives on the cards while wondering whether either of them has the courage to see things through. In the end, the real winner maybe the one who knows when it’s time to call it quits, rather than allow themselves to be manipulated by the constant allure of the odds.
Tazza: The Song of Beelzebub opens in US cinemas October 16 courtesy of Well Go USA.
Trailer (English subtitles)
