In short: Extreme Job (2019)

Original title: 극한직업

Following what is apparently only the most recent in a series of operational mishaps with sees a bus instead of a cop making the arrest of a perp , the merry narcotics division team of long-suffering veteran police captain Go (Ryu Seung-ryong) seem bound for whatever the opposite of glory is for a South Korean cop. It’s not that these guys and gal are particularly mean-spirited or terribly incompetent, much worse, they are a little incompetent and very luckless.

A much younger colleague and arch enemy (obviously coming with a boy band looking team) offers Go what amounts to a final chance to not end up finishing his last years on the job behind a desk (a fate to terrible to contemplate for the man). A well-known felon and probably mid-tier associate of a very big meth dealer has just come out of prison and is now hanging around a place with a bunch of thugs doing nothing. Surely, there’s something going on there that can provide an in into some sort of big criminal operation.

But planning a long-form observation of guys doing not much of anything is a rather difficult thing for these particular cops, so they eventually end up buying the fried chicken restaurant across the (potential) bad guys’ place and do some undercover fry cooking. Turns out these cops are rather better at their pretend job than their actual one, and suddenly the undercover work turns into actual lucrative work. Why, even Go’s wife is now showering when he gets home!

Will our heroes follow the lure of business or keep their cop values intact? Will they accidentally become part of a money laundering business (because clearly, someone here has seen “Breaking Bad”)?

I’ve heard Lee Byeong-heon’s Extreme Job described as an action comedy, but honestly, the film’s  action stays right at the start and the finish of the movie. The largest part of it is concerned with heaping the horrors of sudden unwanted and very unfamiliar success on the broadly drawn but generally fun characters and watching them squirm, while also suggesting that these guys and gals are even unlucky in their successes.

There are a couple of hints at darker elements – Go’s half-beaten personality seems to be the consequence of PTSD following being knifed for example – but the film isn’t interesting in exploring any of this through humour but really prefers to hang around with its characters and tease them a little. So the comedy isn’t particularly deep and incisive, but Extreme Job gets by very well indeed on Lee’s ability to keep the pace up and come up with some new silly business for the characters to scrape against as well as quite a few good jokes about the parallels and differences between the police and the food business with each new scene.


Unlike most comedies involving cops, the whole affair further recommends itself by its general lack of mean-spiritedness, clearly liking its characters too much to be too cruel to them.