On the Line

An unconventional action-crime film from South Korea on an unusual theme. The Koreans wanted to take a different take on gangster flicks and focused on the so-called voice phishing scams, a criminal organization that focuses on scams that dupe people through phone calls and rob them of insane amounts of money. I think everybody has experienced something like that and getting a glimpse into the inner workings of the system was quite interesting. The idea that 150 people in a company have the job of ripping off as many victims as possible is definitely scary. The film focuses on the main character, a former police officer, now a supervisor on a construction site, who loses almost everything and decides to get revenge by infiltrating the organization and tearing it apart from the inside, but he finds out that it's not going to be that easy. There are a lot of familiar stars, every single actor has been in at least five major Korean films, so this is definitely an A-list production with traditionally good visuals, a novel theme and solid action, which doesn't come until the end, but the final half hour offers decent fights (though nothing that would make me fall on my ass, a Korean standard). There's not much violence and the pace is kind of quieter. For a higher rating I missed some decent twist and definitely more frequently dosed action. Better average. Story 3/5. Action 3/5, Humour 1/5, Violence 2/5, Fun 3/5 Music 4/5, Visuals 4/5, Atmosphere 3/5, Suspense 3/5, Emotion 2/5, Actors 4/5. 6/10. (06.05.2022)

What I would have liked as the main theme of the film serves here more as the impetus for a fight that is long but not particularly intense or (by Korean standards) rough. On the other hand, I would have preferred more depth to the issues, more from the experiences of the victim, and less of the gangster background. Yo-han was pretty good, though. (14.09.2022)