Action scenes, fluidly and often wittily choreographed (it’s a joy to witness Jang pummeling some unfortunate punk through a thick wooden door that appears to offer as much resistance to his meaty blows as a wad of wet tissue), are cast in monochromatic green or blue light, to up the style factor. Park Se-Seung’s photography is polished and professional, and given a gritty finish so the images are as high-contrast as the characters’ motivations. It will be a showdown, finally, between those with a code, and those without.
So you can see where this is going: Cop Jung and gangster Jang, though nominally on opposite sides of the law, are going to have to team up in order to bring down the guy operating outside the law altogether. Jang, though taken by surprise, is a powerful boxer whose workouts include using a trussed-up miscreant as a literal punching bag, and he not only survives the attack, but wounds and drives off his attacker. Though he’s certainly unpleasant, it’s hard to be properly terrified by such a psychological blank slate, but he performs his function in the mechanistic plot well enough when he picks the wrong victim: gang boss Jang, driving home from a powwow with a rival mobster. A motiveless psycho with an entirely arbitrary method of choosing his victims, his killing routine involves rear-ending a motorist on a lonely patch of usually rainswept road, and when the driver gets out to examine the damage to their car, stabbing him or her to death with a kitchen knife.
Enter “the devil” (Kim Seong-gyu), sadly the most pallid character in this threesome.
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