Out Of Justice - Korea’s Answer To Magnum Force

Jun

5

Out Of Justice - Korea’s Answer To Magnum Force

≡ Category: Action, Korea, Movie Reviews By Country, Worth A Look |
≅ Written by: Michael Kydonieus

Country: Korea
Genre: Action
Director: Byeong-jin Min
Year: 2001

Rating:

WORTH A LOOK

Let’s face it - Out Of Justice is a mess. The plot is needlessly complicated and confusing. The action scenes and stunts are poorly choreographed and executed. The direction by writer/director Byeong-jin Min is overly stylized, to the point that it pulls you out of the picture. But for lovers of Korean cop thrillers, there are compensations.

The violence is bloody and graphic. No shortage of bullet squibs here. There’s also some gratuitious nudity, for those who appreciate feminine beauty. Best of all, the characterizations are vivid. The depiction of the cameraderie among the police is touching, and the best reason to watch Out Of Justice.

The picture starts with a welter of confusing images. A black booted guy walks portentiously through architecturally stark spaces. A couple of throats are slit. A smug rich kid brutalizes, rapes, and murders a couple of lovely young women, discarding them like garbage in desolate places. The cops catch the rapist/murderer, but he’s released for lack of evidence. Then we get a gratifying scene of this pervert begging for his life and being graphically butchered, with lots of lovely arterial spurting.

It seems that there is a vigilante on the loose, going after criminals that the law cannot punish. He or she leaves a tarot card at the scene of his executions.

That’s a perfectly good premise, but writer/director Byeong-jin Min bungles it.

One of the reasons anyone sees a film like this is for the action, and there is plenty of it. Lots of cars blow up, lots of guns are fired, plenty of people are stabbed, cops take crazy risks with their lives, and there are plenty of knock out, drag out fights. The problem is that all of this mayhem is poorly executed.

The fights are little more than flailing. Watching Out Of Justice, I missed the old high impact Hong Kong action choreography. These shootouts have no flair. Missed shots don’t puncture holes in metal, explode clay pots, and so on, although I will admit that when the bullets hit flesh, the results are gratifyingly bloody. Conceptually, some of the stunts are good, but they’re insultingly cheated. There is a daring jump onto a moving truck from a building, but the jump is edited to pieces, taking all of the danger out of it. It could have easily been done by a stunt man in one uninterrupted take. In another stunt, a motorcyclist plays chicken with a car. At the last minute, he jumps off the bike, which slides into the car, exploding both vehicles on impact and causing the car to flip over. It’s just not believable. Many of the stunts are like this.

The story logic of Out Of Justice is impenetrable. There’s no possible way to follow it because it’s so convoluted and poorly laid out, so whatever the solution to the mystery turns out to be, it’s going to feel arbritrary.

The only thing that does work are the characters. There are two main groups investigating the crimes. The first is the regular police, who are civil servants of average intelligence (not very bright, in other words). These guys are working class grunts. Under these circumstances, as one veteran cop (Hang-Seon Jang) points out, “the law is like a blind man. Only the guys who get touched by accident with the cane go to jail.” These cops are buffoons, portrayed by the usual array of wonderful Korean character actors.

The second group is a special task force set up to find the vigilante. These folks are more serious, competent people with college educations. There is a great deal of resentment between the two groups.

The biggest hothead on the regular police force gets a crush on the ice princess (Eun-Kyung Shin) who is the computer geek on the task force. How their relationship progresses through the movie is one of the great pleasures of Out Of Justice. The friendships among the working class cops are also funny and touching. I chuckled when they made fools of themselves, and I was worried when they were in harm’s way.

Is that reason enough to check out Out Of Justice? Probably not if you are a casual fan of Korean action films, but if you find Koreans interesting in and of themselves, there are many entertaining scenes of working class cops blowing off steam, carousing in the rain, or unraveling romantic entanglements to help pass the time.