Like all great thrillers, A Hard Day delights in the ridiculous scenarios it subjects its lead to.
One of the nice things about watching foreign movies (A Hard Day is from South Korea) is that other parts of the world seem way more willing to root for terrible people; to allow the moral grey area to remain grey. Humans are still human, even if they happen to do a terrible thing.
The plot of A Hard Day is overly complicated and crazy. It has that shaggy dog story quality of just being one thing after another, where the connective tissue doesn’t even matter because the ride is just so compelling. It also makes it hard to talk about because there are just so many ridiculous things, that tying them together in a concise way is probably fruitless. A lot of the movie relies on shock, so you’re better off going in with as little info as possible.
Let me be clear, this movie is a great thriller and if you have a chance to see it I recommend doing so.
Our protagonist is Homicide Detective Gun-soo, who accidentally hits a man while driving back to his mother’s funeral. At the same time, his office is being raided by internal affairs, because they are all dirty. Panicking, he stows the corpse in the trunk of his car, and things only get worse from there for him.
You may be wondering about how appealing it is to root for a man who commits a fatal hit-and-run: well things are not all as they appear. The movie balances the humor in seeing Gun-soo suffer with then humanizing him and eventually allowing him to find redemption.
Basically the plot exists to push Gun-soo as far as it can for our amusement. It’s tense, funny, absurd, and horrific in turn, all for the sake of being entertaining, and it succeeds.
This movie is parts stupid and clever, but what matters is that it all comes together into an energizing time at the movies.
