Mission: Possible

Woo Soo-han thinks of himself as an international agent and actually runs a small detective office; he has neither the skill nor the work. Yoo Da-hee is an officer at the National Intelligence Service who wants to be in the field. A weapons smuggling case drops the two of them into the same assignment. Neither knows who the other really is and they have to work together. Kim Hyung-joo writes and directs. Kim Young-kwang plays Soo-han and Lee Sun-bin plays Da-hee. The genre is spy comedy and the shape is entirely familiar: an incompetent man, a capable woman and a forced partnership. The narrative does not leave it. The humour comes from incompetence. Soo-han cannot do anything correctly and every mistake enlarges the situation; the comedy comes out of that chain. The action is at the scale of mainstream Korean cinema and well staged; the fights in particular are harder than the genre leads you to expect. Lee Sun-bin became known on the action side through this part, which is the best written thing in the film; the narrative does not build her as the man's assistant. It was released during the pandemic and did not find the audience expected. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean action comedy and the mismatched pair. Who it is not for: the script is predictable, the humour is conventional, and the villains are very thinly written.