Choi Dong-hoon of Woochi, The Big Swindle and Tazza: The High Rollers returns to his specialty, a caper film, more ambitious in scope and technology than his previous works, with a hybrid cast including not only his regulars and reliable Korean supporting players but also Hong Kong stars. The resulting crime thriller has become the biggest Korean hit of all time, raking in more than 13 million tickets and narrowly outdistancing the previous record holder, Bong Joon-ho’s The Host (2006).
The runaway hit status of The Thieves is sure to please the film’s financiers and media pundits, but critics and journalists seem to disagree among themselves about why it has been so popular. Much of the media discussion has centered around the so-called “comeback” of Jeon Ji-hyun a.k.a. Gianna Jun, the My Sassy Girl herself, who finally landed a meaty role as the rope-climbing cat burglar Yenicall, but some reviewers expressed perplexity at the fact that Korean viewers, notorious for their picky tastes, simply swallowed the movie en masse despite its loose narrative and sentimental touches. Others find a certain air of corporate anonymity that seems to waft throughout the film troublesome.
These criticisms are legitimate, although they do not really diminish the pleasure of watching Choi nimbly wrangle the talented ensemble cast and the convoluted plot like a master conductor. There is a lot to love in this smart, smooth motion picture. The level of artistry, beginning with versatile cinematography by DP Choi Young-hwan (Tazza) and lighting director Kim Seong-gwan (Bestseller), colorful production design by Lee Ha-joon (The Housemaid) and editing by Shin Min-kyung (Blind) is top-notch. The dialogue is, as usual in a Choi Dong-hoon film, vibrant and witty, if a tad sophomoric.
Despite more than ten major characters with their own complex back-stories, with quite a few of them acting mostly in foreign tongues, almost no actor or actress gets lost in the shuffle. Kim Yun-seok, always in control, and Kim Hye-soo, radiantly beautiful, are given the roles that provide the film’s emotional core, so they come off best. Jeon has never been a bad actress and she acquits herself well here, although I still don’t get why most Korean men go ga-ga over her. Interestingly, Simon Yam and Angelica Lee are given characters that seem to be purposefully conventional, a throwback to a borderline-campy ‘80s Hong Kong actioner, and consequently are not as memorable as they ought to be. (One of Choi’s few missteps was forcing Yam to say much of his lines in horrendous Japanese... he is supposedly impersonating a Japanese tourist!) Despite its globe-hopping narrative, the film never loses viewers’ attention and generates a good deal of suspense in the latter half, in which the perfectly laid-out plan inevitably crashes and every member of the crew must fend for his or herself, climaxing in a thrilling rope-climbing action sequence that displays some astonishing, bone-cracking stunts.
The aforementioned technical razzle-dazzle notwithstanding, The Thieves has the look and feel of an old TV episode like It Takes A Thief or Mission: Impossible, cannily polished and updated. Again, there is nothing wrong with this, but many years down the lane The Thieves may be more meaningful as a canny indicator of shifts in the demography and tastes of the Korean movie-going public than as an attempt to create a truly original crime thriller rooted in Korean history and culture, like Tazza. It might have helped if Macao Park’s (Kim Yun-seok) character was a bit dirtier, or conversely a bit nobler, than he was in the film. While I still greatly enjoyed it, in the end I missed the oddly sympathetic villainy of Agwee or Officer Pyeong (Baek Yun-shik) in Tazza.