THE CHASER Review
I'm a little at a loss to explain the sleeper-hit success of Korean crime thriller The Chaser. The sleeper part makes perfect sense, the film coming from a no-name director and a small production company with no big name stars; it's the massive success that I find baffling. While certainly no slouch, The Chaser is a significant step back from most of its local counterparts in several key areas. The shooting style is fairly bland, action often poorly staged and the characters a little flat. That said, its inversion of the normal cop thriller motifs combined with its bluntly matter of fact staging of brutal violence give this thing some real kick. The strengths of The Chaser are obvious and the flaws also apparent enough that this is one case where the already announced English language remake actually stands a significant chance of improving on the original.
The debut feature from award winning short film director Na Hong-Jin, The Chaser tells the story of Jung-Ho, a former cop turned pimp. Think for a moment about what sort of cop would choose to become a pimp in his post-law enforcement career and you have an immediate grasp of Jung-Ho. He is a surly, foul tempered, hard talking man driven by the pursuit of easy profits. And Jung-Ho is in a bad mood because a number of his girls - girls who he effectively owns, having bought out their bad debts - have recently gone missing. Jung-Ho believes a rival pimp is simply stealing his girls and reselling them for profit but the truth is far worse. There is a serial killer on the prowl, one that has not been detected because he preys exclusively on call girls hired from a variety of escort agencies.
When the call comes in for a girl one night Jung-Ho realizes, too late, that the client's phone number matches the number used to book sessions with a pair of his missing girls and he rushes off to protect his investment. The rival must be captured and taken out of the picture. But while a chance encounter leads Jung-Ho to the correct man, his girl Mi-Jin is nowhere to be found, and the client - Young-min - spouting nonsense about having killed a dozen women. It's enough to bring Young-Min to the police but the killer is smart enough to give them only enough to taunt but not enough to actually charge him or even hold him for an extended period of time. And so the chase is on. It is not a chase to find the killer - he has already been found - it is a chase to find the girl. It they can't find her - or other significant evidence - within twelve hours Young-Min must be set free.
It's this basic inversion that makes The Chaser go. We're not trying to catch a criminal, we've already got him. What needs to be done is to keep him, the audience knowing perfectly well that his intended victim is lying bound and badly beaten but still alive where Young-Min left her and that her life will surely end if Young-Min is freed. Watching this realization slowly dawn on Jung-Ho as he gets to know Mi-Jin's daughter and understand that the little girl will soon be an orphan because he sent her mother into danger and failed to protect her properly gives the film an emotional edge that slowly builds to hysteria as time winds down and the police prove - as they so often do in Korean films - generally incompetent.
It's not hard to see that The Chaser is built on one - if you'll pardon the bad pun - killer premise. It gives the audience just enough of what they expect from a crime drama to hook them in and give them a sense of things while also injecting a fairly tired genre with a bolt of new energy by simply shifting perspectives on the familiar scenario. Director Na's great realization in this is understanding that this shift gives the story the kick it needs all on its own and that he doesn't need to gloss things up. Na chooses, therefore, to present the darker, more violent aspects of the story in a cold blooded, totally matter of fact style that makes them all the more shocking for having been played straight rather than over stylized. But Na also shows a pair of significant weaknesses. First, as is often the case with young directors, he draws only middling performances from his leads, neither of whom have a great deal of natural charisma. And second, there is a line between playing the action blunt and playing the action clumsy and there are definitely moments where Na finds himself on the wrong side of that line.
The Chaser, in the end, is a good film but not a great one, one whose premise outstrips its execution. Why it was targeted for remake is obvious in the extreme and I am more than a little bit curious to see what happens to it when reworked. There is very little that is culturally specific in the film - always the biggest single obstacle - and in the hands of a good team this could well be one of those cases where the remake outstrips the original. And yes, the team here is a good one - the US version reunites William Monahan, Roy Lee and Leonardo DiCaprio, the team that last worked together on The Departed.
