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Baek Jang-mi is getting a gang together. She has two talents, picking pockets and tattoo art. Well, maybe three talents. Her upstart crew sets off a series of turf skirmishes among rivals gangs. When one particularly violent crew gets the drop on Jang-mi, she only survives due to the intervention of Dae-young, an emotionally scarred cop who can handle half a dozen henchmen with ease.
When Jang-mi realizes she was saved by a copper, she ditches him at the nearby coffee-bar. However, their paths soon cross, when Dae-young’s organized crime unit is assigned to take down the marauding pick-pocket gangs. This leads to one of the best cinematic femme-fatale cop seductions in quite some time.
It turns out flatfoot and criminal are connected through associations with Dae-young’s ex-con mother, a former pick-pocket herself. As events come to a head and the driving rain starts to fall, the actio
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City has some fantastic action sequences, the most effective of which are probably straight forward one man vs. many style street-fighting scenes. Lee Sang-gi is a stylish, but not subtle director, and he lets the film get a little overblown at times. Occasionally, the villains veer into over-the-top Dick Tracy territory. However, his leads are great and generate some real heat in their scenes together. Son Ye-jin plays Jang-mi with nuance—a manipulator to be sure, but maybe one with a heart. Then again, perhaps not. Kim Myung-min can administer a beat down with credibility and also convey the anger simmering beneath Dae-young’s stoic façade. However, his unyielding hostility towards his mother eventually becomes tiresome and overwrought.
While its themes of forgiveness and redemption get more than a little heavy-handed, the pacing never suffers for it. City’s mix of high tragedy and slick action results in a distinctively ambitious hard-boiled action-film noir. It screens again during the NYKFF at the Cinema Village Tuesday.