The Target (2014)

Original title: 표적 (Pyo-jeok)

The life of happily married doctor Lee Tae-joon (Lee Jin-wook) takes a rather dark turn when an unconscious man we will later learn to be called Baek Yeo-hoon (Ryu Seung-ryong) is brought into the hospital he’s working in with a gun shot wound. Someone, or - as it will turn out soon enough - various someones are pretty desperate to get their hands on him. As is police woman Jeong Yeong-joo (Kim Sung-ryung), once reports about a murder come in for which Yeon-hoon is the main suspect. Though there’s another part of the police force under the highly punchable Chief Song (Yu Jun-sang) who want to get their hands on her case exclusively, for some reason surely nobody who has ever watched a thriller will understand.

One of the someones kidnaps Tae-joon’s very pregnant wife Jeong Hee-joo (Cho Yeo-jeong), blackmailing him into smuggling the still unconscious Yeo-hoon out of the hospital. Tae-joon isn’t much of a criminal mastermind, so things could end here rather easily, if Yeo-hoon wouldn’t awaken and take things into his own, rather badass hands. From here on out, the film turns into a series of chases, bad twists of fate and kidnappings, Yeo-hoon and Tae-joon eventually having to team up against the rest of the world, once everybody is clear about who is on whose side.

Yoon Hong-seung’s – also working under the somewhat bizarre pseudonym Director Chang – action thriller is not one of those South Korean examples of the form that start out conventionally only to turn into a very different kind of film during their second or third acts. This one’s made from a series of well-worn genre clichés and barely moves away from them at all except in certain small details, like these: very atypically for a Korean, heck, for any, production, there are three female cops in the movie, two good, one evil, all three portrayed matter of factly as competent and capable; and while Jeong Hee-joo is basically treated as an object for everyone else to do violence over for most of the movie, she does have two little moments when she’s actually allowed to do something. Which doesn’t sound like much, but in the world of the action movie, this sort of thing is not terribly common.

Otherwise, this is really exactly the film you’d expect to watch after the plot description: a couple of melodramatic moments – did I mention Yeo-hoon has a brother with a mental disability, which mixes good with pregnant wives in danger? - sprinkled between lots of action, plot twists the film is clever enough not to try to sell as big surprises, and genre tropes getting hit with clockwork precision. Of course, a genre film following the rules of its genre isn’t necessarily a bad thing, and one might very well go into a genre movie wanting exactly this. Plus, though Yoon may hit only the expected plot beats, he hits them in a very satisfying way. The pacing’s excellent too, with the different character groups converging and diverging with maximum efficiency to keep the film moving as well as always tense, so that there’s really no boring minute here. Even though you see every single plot development coming from a mile filled with a thousand other films in this style away.


As I’m nearly always writing when talking about films from South Korea, the technical standard of filmmaking is as high as expected, Yoon never making the mistake to let the fancy technology he is working with getting in the way of the impact of what the actors and stunt people are doing, so the crazy action movie moments are looking their shiniest (and are actually staged as to be parsable by people not named Michael Bay) yet also have the necessary amount of grit.