A serial killer rapes and dismembers several elementary school girls, enraging the public. After accidentally killing the prime suspect without any concrete evidence, and feeling pressure from the president himself, the police attempt to wrap up the case rather than solve it. For police captain Choi Cheol-gi (Hwang Jeong-min, Bloody Tie), who has been passed over for promotion for his lack of police academy background, and investigated for his connection with gangster Jang Seok-gu (Yoo Hae-jin, Tazza: The High Rollers), this is the chance of a lifetime.
He forces Seok-gu to make one of the suspects into an “actor” or scapegoat, while guaranteeing Seok-gu’s contract for a skyscraper by preventing his rival from entering the competition. However, it just so happens that the rival he displaced is a sponsor of an ambitious prosecutor Joo Yang (Ryoo Seung-beom, Crying Fist), who now becomes another player in the game.
Written by prominent screenwriter Park Hoon-jeong (I Saw the Devil) and revised by the director, Ryoo Seung-wan’s seventh feature is filled with familiar elements of the crime thriller genre. Cops beat the hell out of small time crooks, sometimes just for fun. Former mobsters struggle to establish themselves as legal businessmen, while giant corporations are eager to take up what the mobsters once did. Bribed officials turn a blind eye to illegal businesses, which will destroy the few who still believe in making an honest living. Even the environment itself is cold and cruel. Upon this amoral space, inhumane skyscrapers made of concrete and steel tower over the human insects.
As typical as these genre elements may seem, it is not easy to take them to the level of critical social analysis. Many “serious” crime pictures in fact focus more on high octane shootout sequences or thrilling cat-and-mouse play. Thus it is surprising that The Unjust achieves that rare goal, if not perfectly.
Often described as a tense character drama, it is actually more about the relationship between characters. Remember those diagrams explaining the dynamics in a TV drama, using arrows to say that A loves B who hates C who has been married to D whom A had dumped before, while B and D are having an affair? The timing, direction and force of those arrows are what most concerns The Unjust.
Setting aside the strong performance of the cast, each character remains a stereotype, in the good sense. Their occupational, social and class roles remain bigger than their specific lives. They must act and react according to the rules of the game. In this sense, the film reminds audiences of how closely related we are in this social network, how hard it is to escape, and thus, how fatal the small deception of others can be.
Although none of the characters are very likable, we sense the director’s concern for the stress and burdens placed upon them. It would be a waste of time to talk about the brilliance of each cast member in expressing them, but I cannot help championing Ryoo Seung-beom at this point. At first, harassing his inferiors, Ryoo seems to overact a bit on the boundary between humor and hysteria. But soon we realize that it’s a part of his character, coming from his strain felt as a sort of middle manager and his pride as a high-class power elite. Ryoo’s portrayal of the arrogance, rudeness and weariness of stereotypical Korean middle-aged men is stunningly accurate.
In one scene, while bursting out in front of his irritatingly honest investigator, Joo Yang suddenly takes a deep breath, calms himself down and tries to persuade his inferior with a gentler tone of voice, as if he’s afraid of losing his dignity on such a minute matter, only to burst out again louder at the end. Ryoo’s body language and control of space between lines here made gooseflesh out of me. I can earnestly say that Ryoo’s acting alone embodies the core of the film, the stress pervading the network.