Hard Hit

Seong-gyu, a bank manager, gets into his car one morning to take his two children to school. The phone rings on the way: there is a bomb under the seats, it goes off if the car stops, and the caller wants money. Everything after that happens inside one vehicle. Kim Chang-ju directs, in his first film. He spent years working as an editor, and it shows: the rhythm of a thriller shot in a confined space depends almost entirely on where the cuts fall. Jo Woo-jin plays Seong-gyu, a long standing supporting actor taking a lead for the first time, with Lee Jae-in and Ji Chang-wook. It is not original. It is a remake of the 2015 Spanish film El desconocido, released as Retribution. The Korean version keeps the basic construction and changes the background, tying the situation directly to banking, to people ruined by loans, and to the financial anger that followed 2008. The constraint is both its strength and its problem. Because the whole story is inside a car the tension is dense, but in the last section the film has to leave that space, and that is exactly where it loses its grip. Who it is for: viewers who like single location thrillers and Korean genre cinema. Who it is not for: anyone who has seen the Spanish original will find no surprises, and the emotional register spikes abruptly at the end.