Cold Eyes

Yoon-ju (Han Hyo-joo, Masquerade) is a slightly neurotic young cop endowed with a 3-D photographic memory who has applied for the elite surveillance unit of the Seoul Metropolitan Police. She is taken under the wing of the disheveled, bespectacled Chief Detective Hwang (Seol Gyeong-gu, Peppermint Candy), who nicknames her Piglet (each member of the team is represented by a custom-made chess piece of an animal: Squirrel, Snake, Monkey and so on).

While stubborn and, well, a bit pig-headed, Yoon-ju soon displays fierce intelligence, physical stamina and an excellent sense of judgment. However, the team meets their match in a mysterious criminal named James (Jung Woo-sung, Musa) who pulls off a daring bank heist right under their noses. Adapted from the 2007 Hong Kong film Eye in the Sky, directed by Johnny To’s longtime screenwriter Yau Nai-Hoi, Cold Eyes is a pleasantly level-headed thriller. Like Blind (2011), it is remarkable not primarily because of what it does – and it does most of what it is supposed to do exceedingly well – but because of what it doesn’t do. There are no tough guys from opposing camps locking stares in (homoerotic) figurative embraces. There are no melodramatic outbursts that try to browbeat viewers into being “touched”.

Yes, Yoon-ju breaks down and weeps at one point, but it is more out of frustration than of being a “caring” female character. As essayed by Han Hyo-joo in a restrained performance, she comes off both sympathetic and convincing as a young professional with believably annoying personal habits and character flaws, but first and foremost defined by her professional skills. Meanwhile, Seol Gyeong-gu dials down his Method intensity to allow room for Han and other supporting players to shine. His Detective Hwang is not merely “eccentric” but is a shrewd manipulator of human relations and, as the movie hints, intra-agency political games. But perhaps the movie’s biggest surprise is how it conceives its villain, James.

Jung Woo-sung had one of his best recent roles playing against Michelle Yeoh in the clever Chinese wu xia pian/film noir hybrid Reign of Assassins (2010), but it was still a variation on the silently suffering, romantic lead persona in which he has been typecast. Here, Jung plays a master criminal who disappears into his “job” and derives the only joy of his life by observing how his carefully engineered schemes are realized by his team. (In one fascinatingly self-reflexive moment, Detective Hwang quips that James appears to assume the “stance of an omniscient auteur”.) Yet, using a fountain pen as the lethal weapon of his choice, Jung also portrays a frighteningly ruthless and focused murderer who means it when he says he prefers to leave no loose ends. His James is a bona fide hard-boiled villain: not a chatty pastiche in a Tarantino film but one found in, say, a Donald Westlake novel (or a tough-as-nails filmic adaptation of it such as The Outfit [1974]). It is ironic that the least sentimental, the least macho-cool-guy-enamored, the most hardboiled and smart (I haven’t even gotten into the film’s fascinating political stance: sort of Fritz Lang by way of Derek Flint and Man from U.N.C.L.E) Korean thriller I have seen in years is an adaptation of a Hong Kong film. But of course by the mid-2000s the HK film industry had already evolved beyond the old “Hong Kong noir” model. Those who miss Chow Yun-Fat fixing you with a sexy stare while flying through the air blasting two pistols in John-Woo-trademarked slow motion may find Cold Eyes, well, more than a little cold. It is otherwise highly recommended, especially to young female viewers who have been turned off by the lack of identifiable heroines in crime thrillers of this type: I assure you, this baby is different.