A Hard Day

This sly crime thriller from South Korean filmmaker Kim Seong-hun opens with a hit-and-run on a dark night. The life of the driver, hapless Gun-soo (Lee Sun-kyun), unravels from there as he tries to cover up the crime while also managing the funeral of his mother and ducking an internal affairs investigation. Yes, Gun-soo is a police detective on a corrupt squad, who finds himself blackmailed by a nameless voice using the criminal tip line to make his threats. And that's just the first act. The body count rises, and the blackmailer turns out to be so evil and all-seeing that he threatens to become a comic book supervillain. The director resorts to every cinematic trick in the book to create the perfect nightmare scenario for the compromised anti-hero. Think of this as a Korean cop noir with a wicked sense of humor and an absurdly busy catalog of disasters, kind of like a Coen brothers film minus the eccentric personalities, driven at such a fast clip that you don't have time to catch your breath (or ponder the improbabilities of the twists). Ultimately, A Hard Day is more clever than smart, but it's also so entertaining that such distinctions hardly matter. Recommended. (S. Axmaker)