The Chaser...

Introduction

The Asian film market really appears to be opening up these days with some great films being released and also remade by Hollywood, some more successful than others. The Chaser is another release that is currently being remade, this one by the same team apparently who brought us The Departed, so it looks quite promising so far. So what's it about?

Joong-ho (Yun-seok Kim) is an ex-detective turned pimp who's in a bit of a tizz as he's lost a few of his girls recently and under pressure from his bosses to provide money. Joong-ho believes the girls have run away with his money but needs one of his girls, Mi-Jin (Yeong-hie Seo), to visit a last minute client and earn some money, despite her being ill with flu and wanting to stay at home with her daughter. Too late, Joong-Ho realises that Mi-Jin is heading to the same client as all the other girls prior to them disappearing and his ex-cop head knows something is wrong but is unable to do anything about it despite dashing out to the general area where they were heading.



A minor fender bender as he's driving around looking for Mi-Jin, brings the client, Young-Min (Jung-woo Ha ) into his path. The ex-cop knows that he is connected to Mi-Jin but thinks that the blood spattered man is responsible for selling her into slavery rather than killing her. Thus begins a frustrating sequence and interview with the local police who are still smarting from the potential political fallout of a protestor who decided it would be a good idea to throw excrement in the face of the Mayor (what a shot, what a mess…). The police aren't too sympathetic with Joong-ho, suspecting that he's more interested in the money aspect than anything else.

And then Young-Min confesses to not only killing Mi-Jin but also 12 other women. This gets the attention of the police straight away, but Joong-ho still thinks that Young-Min has sold the girls and doesn't quite buy his serial killer story. Despite searches, the police find nothing and the local prosecutor decides that Young-Min must be released. Joong-ho hasn't got long to find the lair of Young-Min before he heads back and removes all evidence of his activity.

Overall

Not really sure what to think about the news that the team behind The Departed are going to remake this one. Not that they did a bad job, far from it, but this film has a distinctly Asian film to it and I'm not sure how they address that without losing the essence of the film.

For example, a major point is this film is about the behaviour and incompetence of the Police. There are parallels that can be drawn over the political pressures that Police face but not quite sure that the entire Police dept would be quaking if someone threw sh*t in the face of the Mayor, suspect that most of them would actually be laughing. The more serious point though is that interrogations here are rather brutal affairs that are far removed from Western democracy interrogations with Miranda-type warnings and tape recordings. Here the Police have no qualms about just laying into suspects and then making up evidence if they can't find any that fits.



One of the things that stands out for me in this film is that the main character of Joong-ho is an ex-policeman who is not exactly on the straight and narrow path, playing a rather unsympathetic role for Western audiences but probably one that is accurate in his part of the world to a degree. His sole motivation throughout this film is the loss to his income, which has increased as a number of his girls have disappeared, him thinking that they have just run away at first. Despite this, you do have some sympathy for him and root for him as he searches for his missing girl, and this is mainly because you as the audience have more information than he does. He runs through this film simply believing that the serial killer has just sold his girl into slavery, and at times this is so evident in that he fails to take the situation as seriously as he should. This is not the usual tack of a Hollywood film and is all the better for it. There's also a nice blend of humour that would seem out of place in such a serious film, this isn't a dark comedy but it is funny in places.

This is a stunningly original film and I would recommend this to anyone who can stand films in a foreign dialect with subtitles (which is the only way to watch foreign films as I keep saying). Superb.