If Jackie Chan had made “The Maltese Falcon”, the finished product would not be a million miles away from “Public Enemy”, a new film from Korea. Sul Kyung-gu gives us his Detective Kang as a mixture of Humphrey Bogart and Charlie Chaplin. While this mixture may seem incongruous, it matches the mood of this film perfectly, alternatively hard-boiled detective thriller and dark slapstick comedy.
Like all of the best crime films, the crime here is fairly irrelevant to the plot. This film is all about mood and characterisation, which is just as it should be. Suffice it to say that the corrupt and incompetent Detective Kang is on the trail of a cold-blooded corporate killer straight out of Bret Easton Ellis. What results is a quirky journey into the darker aspects of Korean life.
This is by no means a perfect film: too much of the action is disjointed and this makes the significance of much of what the viewer sees hard to judge. On the positive side, it succeeds in being both funny and shocking. Additional points go to the film for not featuring any martial arts. As someone who is now heartily sick of martial arts having to appear in everything, it was refreshing that the violence in this film is very much in the “punch-in–the-face-makes-people-fall-over” vein. As a fan of chainsaw-wielding mayhem, it was also nice to see a bit of that.
Overall then, if you like crime films, and aren’t an idiot who doesn’t like reading subtitles, then see this film.
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