A Company Man

Hyeong-do works at a company: he wears a suit, keeps office hours, attends meetings and goes through performance reviews. The company's business is murder. Behind a structure that appears to trade in metals, it employs professional killers. After one job he meets the family of the man he killed and decides to leave. Resigning from the company is not possible. Lim Sang-yoon directs. So Ji-sub plays Hyeong-do. The idea is to turn assassination into office work. The best passages are not the action but the company scenes: talk of promotion, the arithmetic of moving upstairs, the training of a new hire. Crime films in Korean cinema are usually told through gang structures; this one substitutes a corporate hierarchy, and the satire comes from that. The action concentrates in the last section and is hard in style; the choreography rests on efficiency rather than display. The weakness is the romantic line. The woman he connects with has no function beyond supplying a motive. So Ji-sub carries the character with almost no dialogue, and the cold tone of the film depends on it. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean crime films and genre work with corporate satire. Who it is not for: the story is familiar, the second half returns to formula, and the violence is heavy.