With its compelling pace, momentum-building electronic score, and pristine widescreen cinematography, this remake is a slick and stylish package that delivers on action and suspense, but falls short of emotions, character, and its intriguing philosophical premise that gives the remake its new title, Believer.
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In Korean commercial director Lee Hae-young’s remake of Johnnie To’s 2013 action thriller Drug War, Cho Jin-woong (The Handmaiden, 2016) plays detective Jo Won-ho, an obsessed detective hell-bent on capturing the mysterious drug lord Mr Lee. What is just a job becomes personal when a teenage informant whom Jo coaxes into helping him with the case ends up dead, murdered by Lee’s henchmen. Through his dialogue, we learnt that she was like a niece to him and, perhaps, we think that Jo’s pursuit of Lee would be elevated from job obligation to personal vengeance, and enable us to empathise with Jo’s almost crazed pursuit of Mr Lee. But the film does not lead us on that path. In fact, the film seems to have forgotten that the girl died as it races proficiently from one plot point to the next.
A planned explosion of a drug lab in Seoul by the mysterious Lee leaves everyone dead except Rak (Ryu Jun-yeol), a low-level gofer whose mother died in the explosion and who later agrees to help Won-ho find Lee as revenge, not really for his mother, but for his dog, which has suffered serious burns. Experienced in conducting negotiations in the drug trade, Rak and a disguised Jo meet Sun-chang (Park Hae-jun), a founding syndicate member, and Ha-rim (Kim Joo-hyuk’s final role), a vicious Chinese-Korean drug boss, to discuss a business proposition involving a new, more powerful, strain of cocaine called Leica. Jo’s plan is to induce the elusive Lee to appear in the flesh to effect an arrest. But things are not as simple as it appears to be.
With its compelling pace, momentum-building electronic score, and pristine widescreen cinematography, this remake is a slick and stylish package that delivers on action and suspense, but falls short of emotions, character, and its intriguing philosophical premise that gives the remake its new title, Believer.
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