#lee sun kyun

i decided to watch a hard day, being a fan of jo jin-woong and lee sun-kyun, and seeing how it had multiple cannes accolades.

a hard day is about a corrupt cop (lee sun-kyun) who extorts money and an even more corrupt cop (jo jin-woong) who smuggles and distributes drugs in illegally-run nightclubs. when lee sun-kyun accidentally hits and buries a man jo jin-woong is after, lee finds himself threatened by jo, who forces him to unearth and deliver the wanted man. 

as you can probably guess from the above description, most of what happens in this film doesn’t re-invent the wheel of this genre. except for the fact that lee had buried the man together with his mother in her coffin, and the sequence that led to that joint burial was ingenious. lee, who had dumped the body bag in his car trunk, had to somehow move the body to the hospital morgue and then into his mother’s coffin, all in 15 minutes. this borderline ridiculous act is achieved by connecting the body bag and his daughter’s radio-controlled toy with a string, then using the toy’s remote to pull the string - and later the body bag - through the hospital’s vents. by keeping the scenes fast-paced with little elaboration, the director (who also directed netflix’s kingdom) forces the viewer to keep up.

granted, there are there small bits of typical korean film humour in a hard day (e.g. jo assaulting lee in the office on the pretext of “oh i thought he was someone else”, lee half-heartedly investigating the hit-and-run case he had committed). but these moments fell somewhat flat, and do not contribute to the movie’s tone. instead, the director’s willingness to move the plot along quickly made a hard day a much more pleasant watch.

unfortunately i think action thrillers about corrupt cops are, by nature, fairly limited in plot content and character development. as films of this genre go, it does an above average job by keeping the pace fast and action scenes taut. – 7/10