The Big Swindle

A five-person crew pulls off a large robbery at Korea's central bank. Escaping, the man regarded as the brain of the operation dies in an accident and the money is left in limbo. The rest begin hiding both from the police and from each other. The film is not interested in the robbery. It is interested in the reckoning after it: the event is broken up into flashbacks and each character gets their own account, and the accounts do not match. Who is lying is the real puzzle. The form rests on that construction: jumps in time, interrogation scenes, different versions of the same event. It is Choi Dong-hoon's first feature. He would later become one of the safest pairs of hands at the Korean box office with large-scale work like The Thieves and Assassination; this is smaller but carries the same taste for structure. It opened on 16 April 2004 and drew 2.12 million admissions on a budget of $3.5 million. At the Korean Film Awards Choi won both Best Screenplay and Best New Director, and Baek Yoon-sik took Best Supporting Actor. Park Shin-yang and Yum Jung-ah are in the cast. Who it is for: viewers who like Korean crime cinema and puzzle-structured heist films. Who it is not for: anyone who wants to bond with a character. The film leads with its cleverness and never lets you know anyone well enough.