Crew
Director/Screenplay – Lee Won-tae, Producers – Seo Kang-Ho & Won-seok Jang, Photography – Park Se-seung, Music – Jo Yeong-wook. Production Company – Kiwi/Acemaker Movie Works/Best Associates.
Cast
Ma Dong-seok (Jang Dong-soo), Kim Mu-yeol (Jung Tae-suk), Kim Sung-kyu (Kang Kyung-ho), Yoo Seung-mok (Ahn Ho-bong), Choi Min-chul (Kwon Oh-sung), Heo Dong-won (Choi Moon-sik), Yoo Jae-myung (Heo Sang-do)
Plot
Cheonan, South Korea, 2005. A killer is striking by ramming victims’ vehicles from behind in his car and then attacking the drivers. Police detective Jung Tae-suk tries to get his superior to accept that this is the activities of a serial killer but is dismissed for lack of evidence. The killer next targets Jang Dong-soo, one of the most powerful gangsters in the city, but Dong-soo fights back and drives the killer off. Tae-suk goes to see Dong-soo in hospital and wants him as a witness. Gradually, the two men develop a cautious trust and agree to combine forces to find the serial killer – Tae-suk using the backing of the police force and Dong-soo the illicit methods of the underworld. However, the killer is clever and ahead of them both.
The South Korean hard-boiled gangster film has become a genre unto itself. The genre began with The General’s Son (1990) and was refined with the likes of A Bittersweet Life (2005), A Dirty Carnival (2006), The Man from Nowhere (2010), New World (2013), The Outlaws (2017) and Night in Paradise (2021), among a good many others. Recent years have seen some odd genre hybrids in particular with the bodyswap film in Spiritwalker (2020), Devils (2023) and the comic The Dude in Me (2019).
After learning that The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil was to be remade by James Wan, I decided it was time that I checked out the original. It blends the hard-boiled Korean gangster genre with the serial killer film. The nearest equivalent in Korean cinema would probably be I Saw the Devil (2010) about a detective obsessively pursuing a serial killer.
The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil sets up the whole hard-boiled thing fairly well. There is a great opening watching the characters move through the gungy world. In these scenes, we are introduced to head gangster Ma Dong-seok in a gymnasium working out and belting a punching bag before at the end of the scene his lackeys take down the bag and reveal there is a person inside. In a subsequent scene, Dong-seok is talking with an associate when one of the associate’s lackeys interrupts him, which he responds to by pulling one of their teeth. Later in the film, Lee Won-tae gives us a great fight scene with multiple parties really going at and proceeding to wreck an entire warehouse. Ma Dong-seok (aka Don Lee) slots into the tough guy role with great presence.
The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil makes a claim to be based on a True Crime story. In this case, it takes the story of Yoo Young-chul who killed and cannibalised twenty senior citizens and massage parlour workers over a ten-month period in 2003-4 before being apprehended. The collaboration between police and underworld is greatly exaggerated in the film – in real life, Yoo was apprehended by several employees of a massage parlour he had targeted who recognised him and then came forward at the trial to give evidence. This was a minor aspect of the case but in the film is blown up to becomes the central novelty of seeing the police and underworld combining forces. This plot set-up reminds somewhat of Fritz Lang’s M (1931) where the underworld step in to stop a child killer.
The focus is almost all on the cop/gangster alliance. We see or get little insight into who the serial killer is. Certainly, his m.o. of ramming into people’s cars and then attacking the driver when they get out to discuss details or get irate is one of the more unusual. That said, the film does place some fiendish twists and turns on things – Ma Dong-seok’s gangster killing a rival and placing the killer’s knife at the scene so that the police can obtain their DNA evidence and then the killer coming to the funeral and placing a note that he didn’t do the killing in the hands of the dead man’s son. The courtroom ending stretches plausibility a little but holds a solid punch, before reaching a perfectly sardonic twist in the end.
Trailer here