This New World is flat
New World
(out of 4) Starring Choi Min-sik, Lee Jung-Jae and Hwang Jun-min. Directed by Park Hoonjung. 134 minutes. Opens March 22 at Cineplex Yonge & Dundas and Sheppard Grande. 18A South Korean gangster film New World tries to expand the genre with nods to The Godfather but can’t escape the over-the-top acting, expansive violence and overdone story typical of Seoul-made crime dramas.
The tale of the takeover of the suddenly leaderless Goldmoon crime syndicate relies on the fact frontrunner Ja-sung (Lee Jung-Jae of The Housemaid) is a cop, planted inside the organization for several years. He’s supported by an army of slickly suited thugs, all decked out in white shirts, the better to show off blood splatters. Typically gory, scores are settled in New World with baseball bats, Bowie knives and an occasional shovel to the cranium.
Characters are drawn in similar straightforward style: nervousness is telegraphed by prodigious sweating and brow mopping. And that’s from a guy who’s undercover and desperate to stay that way.
Ja-sung’s main competition for top spot is Jung (Hwang Jun-min, milking the part for all he’s worth), a ruthless fop with a bad perm and worse temper. It’s all getting a bit too much for Ja-sung, who would like to hang up his sharp suit and quit the game to spend time with his wife. But his recruiter, the crusty police chief Kang ( I Saw the Devil’s and Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik) convinces him he needs to stick around to see the operation through.
Multiple plot twists, database hacking, police set-ups and a crew of screwball assassins called “Yanbian hoboes” keep adding twists and stuffing characters into the plot, and the overlong runtime of more than two hours contributes to making New World an old-fashioned slog. Director Park Hoonjung, who also wrote the overly ambitious script, is reaching for more with New World and almost gets there in the meatier story of the conflicted Ja-sung, torn between his devotion to duty as a cop and his desire to quit risking his life to infiltrate a nest of lawless vipers. But that concept is hardly new.
An ending that’s not as much of a surprise as Park would hope ties a ribbon around the often-flat New World, which despite its modern urban setting remains an oldschool battle between cops and bad guys that shows there’s wrongdoing on both sides of the law.