Lee
Hwan will confirm all your suspicions about closers who choke in the ninth
inning. He really was taking payoffs from gamblers. Once the scandal broke, the
only work he can find is with the loan-sharking gangsters whom his accomplice
owed big time. It turns out the kid can throw a punch as well as he can hurl a
baseball (he never really had any control problems, mind you). However, when
the outfit known as Emperor Capital expands into waterfront real estate, the
double-crosses start coming like Mariano fastball-cutters in Park Sang-jun’s For the Emperor (trailer here), which releases
today on BluRay, DVD, and digital platforms from Well Go USA.
Lee
Hwan happened to be picking up his take from his latest blown save in a seedy
gambling den right when the cops raided it. Although he was let off with a
wrist-slapping, he reputation is shot. He also forfeited a large bag of illicit
cash. To pay off a debt he inherited from his front-man, Lee Hwan collects from
a hard-headed has-been gangster for Jung Sang-ha, Emperor Capital’s CEO. As we
know from the fantastically violent prologue, Lee Hwan has a knack for this
kind of work.
A
one-off quickly turns into a full time gig for Lee Hwan, with his tenacious street-fighting
chops and knowledge of sports betting propelling him up the ladder. Soon, he
secretly takes up with Madame Cha, the hostess of the Emperor’s private club,
who is up to her eye-lashes in debt to the group. Jung is not exactly thrilled
with their relationship and his lieutenants are even less enthusiastic about
all the slack he cuts Lee Hwan. However, the former jock is in over his head
trying to navigate the schemes Jung and Han-deuk, the sinister chairman are
hatching between them.
There
is also a whole lot of knife fighting. We are talking mega-gritty, super-bloody
street brawling and some of the best tenement hallway melee since the original The Raid. For action fans, these
extended sequences are like watching ballet, but for the squeamish, they could
cause blackouts and short-term memory loss.
Lee
Min-ki (who finished work on Emperor six
months before commencing his mandatory military service) brings an erratic,
slightly unstable sensibility to Lee Hwan that works well in context. He also
generates some heat with the otherwise ice cold Lee Tae-im in sex scenes that
are unusually steamy for mainstream Korean cinema. However, character actor Park
Sung-woong (Tabloid Truth, Man on High Heels, etc.) just towers over the film as the smooth but ruthless Jung.
