This has been a bumper Cannes festival for South Korean cinema, with five features playing across the official selection, two in the genre-friendly Midnight Screenings slot that helped springboard Yeon Sang-Ho’s zombie apocalypse thriller Train To Busan to commercial and critical success last year. One of this year’s late-night premieres, The Merciless (Bulhandang) is a superior slice of hardboiled pulp fiction in the blossoming “Korean Noir” style.
Byun Sung-Hyun’s violent underworld saga brings little new to the genre, but its reliable cast, slick visuals and testosterone-drenched mood should draw a readymade global audience of Asian action fanboys. Launched in domestic theaters last week, with a French release scheduled for next month, the production announced sales to 85 territories to coincide with its Cannes launch.
The Bottom Line
Conventional Korean crime caper.
Set in the coastal city of Busan, the pic begins with a wry exchange between a pair of squeamish junior mobsters drawing parallels between eating seafood and committing cold-blooded murder. This darkly comic vignette seems to promise a more arch, knowing, Tarantino-esque take on the gangster genre. But the plot soon settles into a more familiar mix of supercharged machismo, casual sadism, one-dimensional characters and profanity-peppered dialogue spiced with misogyny and homophobia. Indeed, the film’s domestic launch suffered boycott threats after Byun was called out for making sexist comments on Twitter, prompting him to make a public apology.
Feeling at times like a Korean-language cousin of Martin Scorsese’s The Departed, which was itself a remake of an Asian crime thriller, The Merciless revolves around a generation-spanning bromance between youthful wannabe gangster Jo Hyun-su (boyishly pretty K-pop music star Yim Si-Wan) and genial but notoriously amoral gangland veteran Han Jae-ho (Sul Kyung-Gu). This odd couple first forge a brotherly bond in prison after backing each other up in a string of brutal confrontations with bad-ass rivals and crooked guards.
On the surface, Hyun-su is an insolent young punk trying to pick a fight with anybody who crosses his path. But flashbacks reveal him to be a hotshot cop placed deep undercover inside the jail by his ruthless female police chief Cheon (Jeon Hye-jin), who is playing a long game to infiltrate a massive drug-smuggling operation run by Jae-ho’s paranoid crime boss, Chairman Ko Byung-gab (Kim Hie-Won). After winning his trust in jail, Hyun-su later joins Jae-ho as a foot soldier in Ko’s underworld empire, which is already lousy with lingering grudges and volatile rivalries.
Restlessly jumping back and forth in time, The Merciless comes together like a jigsaw, each piece revealing more detail of a grand canvas full of risky shared secrets, fragile loyalties and Faustian bargains. In the process, the plot gradually gains in sophistication as initially sketchy characters acquire a little extra shading, and familiar tropes prove less predictable than they first appeared.
The cinematography is luscious and the action sequences impressively staged, especially a massive brawl in which the camera becomes a kinetic player in the fray, pinballing dizzily around the room.
But in essence, Byun Sung-Hyun’s gangster saga is still formally and dramatically conservative, sticking comfortably within genre conventions, shunning psychological complexity in favor of violence as aestheticized spectacle. The unspoken homoerotic tension between Hyun-su and Jae-ho, for example, is very vaguely teased but never honestly addressed. A minor addition to the Korean action cinema canon, The Merciless offers thin pleasures in a glossy package.
Cast: Yim Si-Wan, Han Jae-ho, Jeon Hye-jin, Kim Hie-Won
Director: Byun Sung-Hyun
Screenwriters: Byun Sung-Hyun, Kim Min-Soo
Cinematographer: Cho Hyoung-Rae
Editor: Kim Sang-bum, Kim Jae-bum
Music: Kim Hong-Jip, Lee Jin-Hee
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Midnight Screenings)
Sales company: CJ Entertainment, Seoul
120 minutes
