Chaser serial

These seeming paradoxes are the essence of Hong-jin Na's world, a world where if you check out the rest of his work the adults act like children and the children are invariably smarter than the adults. I have commented in my review of The Wailing that the art and majesty of Hong-jin Na's work as a director and story-teller is the humanistic slant, his ability to make the viewer care about the people on screen, no matter how strange the story gets.

American directors could learn from such a master. This is really not everyone's cup of tea. The film is indeed very well made, but I found it so good and disturbing that I actually don't want to see it again. It is very unpredictable. Yeong-hie Seo was exceptional as the last abductee Mi-jin Kim. The police is depicted as completely incompetent idiots, actually. Not sure if this was the intention or if this is the norm, because I've seen the police act in similar fashion in other films.

They really do the strangest things. When I heard comments on a radio program that "The chaser" is better than "Oldboy", my curiosity was aroused to the extent that I went to see it. After two hours of intensely disturbing cinematic experience, I understand why.

Five years ago when "Old boy" came out, it was hailed as ingenious, mainly because of the novelty. Looking back, the movie is better described as showy, shamelessly contrived and not really that clever. It is easily mistaken to be a suspense-thriller but while it superficially has all the ingredients of one, it isn't. There is no "twist" in the conventional sense, only twists in that it dares to defy conventional Hollywood predictability, for example see SPOILER at the end of these comments.

The plot line is quite straightforward. A fallen-cop-turned-pimp Eom, suspecting that two of his disappeared "girls" were actually sold by a weird client Jee, sends to him Mi-jin, his favourite prostitute and also a mother of an 8-year-old daughter, as bait. Jee turns out to be a psychopathic serial killer. In the midst of torturing Mi-jin, Jee encounters unexpected intrusion, kills and flees. By sheer coincidence this is the only contrivance in this movie he bumps, literally, into Eom who discovers his identity through his cell phone number.

This is only the beginning of the story. In his debut, director Na Hong-jin tells this gritty story with apt bluntness, blow-by-blow fashion figuratively and literally. While graphic violence, blood-in-profusion notwithstanding, is not particularly out-of-line, it's the atmospheric oppression that is intensely disturbing to the audience. At the centre of it all is the character study of Eom, the last person to be considered a hero, trying to help the little girl to find her mother. Also in the backdrop are social and political issues, including a rather sharp jab at the inept Korean police force.

Hong-jin Na's The Chaser is all at once a really well played black comedy running in perfect tandem with the fact it is a brutally effective, perfectly pitched causality thriller the whole time playing out with this biting, sociopolitical slant running underneath proceedings on top of a really quite affecting character study. The film follows the South Korean capital Seoul based Joong-ho Eom Kim , an unpleasant character; a former police officer turned pimp seemingly turned police officer again with a penchant, it seems, for long distance running.

The man operates out of a small, dingy office with what appears a long suffering male employee working via several mobile phones in the process of running his prostitution business, as said employee distributes nude fliers advertising the services. Such a tactic is wholly necessary, since business has not been particularly good in the recent run what with the disappearance of numerous girls, most of whom still owe him money, Eom's enterprise is flailing.

Eom's jittery mannerisms and somewhat panicked dealing with each problem and person as it arises suggests a man on the proverbial edge; his violent reaction as pimp to one of his few remaining girls as he deals with a male client wishing to illegally film his session with the young woman demonstrating his aggressive characteristic and telling us he is nary afraid to deal with a problem in such a full on, assertive manner.

In amidst all of this is one of Eom's other few remaining call girls: the thin, softly spoken Mi-jin Kim Seo ; a call girl we like a little more than we might usually since she is the mother of one very young daughter, their bond or what-have-you put across via some of the daughter's drawings pinned to a fridge door in their flat.

Kim is forced out to a client by Eom against her influenza influenced wishes, a job over at an apartment complex housing many which seems routine enough but is only enough to see her fall foul of a yet unmasked serial killer named Young-min Jee Ha , whose targets are call girls and whose humiliating, sexually perverse modus operandi involving penetration of-sorts with a phallic shaped object, but not as you'd think, the film in no way is shy of showing. When the initial sequence of Kim and Jee coming together in his apartment rendered house of pain unfolds, the scene is an agonising set piece highlighting precisely what has unfolded time after time in the past without much in the way of action from those employed to stop it.

The sordid interaction additionally appears prolonged, as if the inevitable is ages way; the methods the serial killer is to apply to his latest victim only really hinted at in amongst all the threat: they are demonstrated without actually being successfully carried out, and for the rest of the film the incident is successfully used as precisely the fate which awaits the helpless Kim should certain parties fail in their quests. Undercutting most of these events is an interesting tract which is more broadly linked to that of the proper authorities running around trying, and persistently failing, to find the rouge whom threw excrement at the mayor of the city.

This mayor, guarded by some of Eom's ex-police friends whom anyway appear disenchanted at this political figure of authority, and his aide's attempts at trying to finger someone for a crime relatively small in comparison to other events unfolding sees Na hinting at a distinct flaw in South Korea's police procedural and politically minded system; something which begins with an important man whose bodyguards dislike him and continuing with their abject failure to correctly prioritise situations.

Their panic over, and failure to deal with, such an occurrence is made all the more agonising when it is slowly revealed young women are being killed off in amidst the lower echelons of the city's underbelly. The second item is more broadly linked to that of Eom, the film going on to cover certain redemptive themes linked to him, but with the overlying idea that he is initially doing what it is he's doing because his cash flow in low and a missing call girl does little for business.

This clashes with the fact a girl's life is perilously close to being ended in a desperate fashion because of his own selfishness; his misogyny initially putting him on a similar tract in this sense with the killer very early on, the disregarding of women and essential objectification of them as either tools capable of bringing money in or as victims for an ever-escalating psychotic episode effectively the two mindsets shared by both Eom and Jee.

Director Na doesn't so much blur the lines that dictate Eom's apparent motivation for what it is he eventually comes to undertake in the form of a quest; instead, beginning his lead in the firm mould of an anti-hero on a set side of the proverbial line before seeing this violent and somewhat pig-headed individual having to go through a realisation process which sees him come into contact with the myth behind one of his anonymous female employees: thus effectively leading him on to deeply care for her and tempt himself into changing his ways.

The film is everything a race-against-time thriller ought to be, tight; well-woven; simplistic without having to dumb-down and without anything too brash nor overcooked to have it feel overdone and convoluted. The entire thing a really well played, quite gripping thriller, in which the good guys aren't as necessarily competent nor upstanding as you might think and those of a more sordid nature are hinted at as perhaps having a mite of righteousness inside of them; Na balancing each of the strands, character plights and tones wonderfully well to produce one of the better films to have come out of the Asian region in recent years, and one of the better entries to that recent South Korean wave of films that has emerged.

The Chaser : Brief Review - A decent serial-killer thriller with Korean realism feels better just because of true story factors. When i looked at The Chaser from cinematic aspects, i found it okay, decent actually. But when i learnt that it was inspired from real events, the entire perspective of looking at it has changed for me. I was like, there is no thrill, no suspense, why does it feel so regular and dumb? Then i realised, ohh that's how it happened in real, okay then.

I don't have to ask for filmy elements now, it's just about creating the visual of those shocking real incidents. This one thing has forced me to call it a good thriller otherwise i have lot of complaints about the writing, screenplay and direction of the film. A disgraced ex-policeman who runs a small ring of prostitutes finds himself in a race against time when one of his women goes missing.

It is inspired by real-life Korean serial killer Yoo Young-chul who brutally killed many girls. Somewhere, it reminded me of Hollywood Classic 'Silence Of The Lambs' where similiar kind of impotent man kills young girls. But that film was very detailed about the reasons and immensely thrilling with some psychological tricks.

Here, The Chaser does not provide any concrete reasons for the crimes and even for the protagonist's heroism. It could be relative to those real events i don't know but i would have liked it more if the writer had used cinematic liberty correctly with some dramatic and fictional changes.

Anyways, let it be. The actors are considerably good, the screenplay is little dragged in the second half, the dialogues are decent, the cinematography is nice and the direction is okay. This is one of the rare occasions when i loved the Bollywood Remake more than the original Korean Flick. Murder 2 came out really well with proper reasoning and emotional bonding. The Chaser might have looked better if had seen it 13 years ago, now after watching thousands of Classics, I didn't find anything special about it.

Chaser was a solid crime thriller that honestly had some interesting story and plot points that were made in a very good way that fits very well in a modern society. Story was like i said well made and it had good characters in it,but the best ones were our detective and killer and their talk in a station was well made to. Actors were also good as their characters and they done a good job in that segment. Ending had some captivating ideas that will shock some people but i also liked it how it was done.

The Chaser was another good Korean thriller that done another good job. The Chaser is a skilled, talented synthesis of detective adventure, desperate dismay and dark comedy from South Korea and a prototype for what a well-made thriller should be in the West, too.

Its foremost chase scene features a foot pursuit through the derelict constricted nighttime streets of Seoul. No car bombs. The climax is the outcome of everything that has come before, not an obligatory display.

This is excitement, and a fine instance of a film gripping the audience by the lapel with vicious kicks, hectic foot chases and some authentically revolutionary variations on the police procedural. The film's structure is unyielding in sustaining suspense. The plot is an task in audience treatment. First-time director Na Hong-jin knows precisely what he's doing. Like Hitchcock, he gives the audience exactly enough information to be irritated.

It's clear to us what the characters should be doing, yet there are brilliant reasons why it isn't clear to them. If you can engineer that in a screenplay, you've already exceeded the standard of the typical modern thriller. Another power of this gruesome thriller that expands into a cry of indignation at the ineffectiveness of the system is in its thought toward characters. The villain is seen as a psychological low-oxygen area, a man without a sense of right and wrong to whom both are uniformly irrelevant.

The pimp starts out with plain mercenary motivations and steadily develops his trepidations in reaction to a somewhat predictable but extremely well-handled revelation.

In between sporadic but crucial moments of chisel-scything terror there's some strikingly black humor and excellent acting, but what you react to before anything else was the gravelly realism. There are no supermen and no larger-than-life stunts. When the actors run, we see that they're running. These shots continue in time and are not manufactured after inexplicable cutting.

The physical truths of the action sequences are appreciated and obeyed. We start to familiarize ourselves with the neighborhood. The cops are not run-of-the-mill characters but simply well-drawn everyday officers. No one in this hard-bitten actioner seems to be in automatic. When I see a film like this, it evokes to me what we're overlooking.

So many mainstream movies are just snake oil. Even if you're essentially exhausted with this stuff, the film is marked by the grimy pace of its foot chases, and the efficiency of its craft as it modifies its tone naturally between delirious tension and procedural excitement, not to mention the unfortunate real-world outcome of at least one character.

Korea is making some great films in this decade, but I wouldn't consider The Chaser to be among their best. I had some issues with this movie, although it still left me with some great impressions. My favorite thriller of all time is Seven, and this film had a feeling similar to it, especially with the dark setting. It is a different kind of thriller because in the first 20 minutes the protagonist has already managed to catch the serial killer.

The thrills come once the serial killer is interrogated by the police officers who show their complete ineptness to solve the case even when the killer has admitted his crimes.

The problem is that the police officers aren't able to find the bodies and have no evidence other than his testimony to accuse him in trial. They have only 12 hours to discover the whereabouts of the bodies before they have to set him free. Why isn't his testimony enough? Because the killer is acting like a lunatic who doesn't know what he's saying. The thriller almost turns into a comedy after watching the complete ineptness of the police officials.

That is where the film lost me a little bit, because it goes a little too far with this issue that Hong-jin Na is trying to point out: Korean officials are completely inept and incapable of solving a crime that has been placed right before their eyes.

The crime seems like a simple one to solve, there are leads they can follow all over the place, but they keep on screwing up and get nowhere. I did however like the twist near the end of the film that you would probably never see in a Hollywood film because it's just way too dark. Joong-ho Yun-seok Kim is a pimp who is worried about his business because some of his work girls have disappeared.

He believes that they've left him, but what he doesn't know is that there is a serial killer who has been killing them off one by one. After realizing that his last girl left the cell phone in his car, he begins to believe that someone is kidnapping his girls and selling them abroad. He goes back and retraces the number of the person who solicited the girls when they last disappeared and realizes they all come from the same number. When the serial killer, Young-min Jung-woo Ha , calls again he sends another girl and orders her to give him the man's address once she arrives at his place.

Because the killer always asks the girls to pick him up at a random location and then has them drive him to his place. The problem is that when Mi-jin Kim Yeong-hie Seo arrives at Young-min's house there is no signal and she can't send the message. The pimp doesn't know the exact address of the house, but he knows the whereabouts because that is where the last girl had left his car and he finds Mi-jin's vehicle there too.

Top credits Director Na Hong-jin. See more at IMDbPro. Trailer The Chaser. The Chaser - Teaser. Full Episode Photos Top cast Edit. Kim Yoo-jeong Eun-ji as Eun-ji. Bon-woong Ko Oh-jot as Oh-jot. Ji-Yeon Yoo Hee-jung as Hee-jung. Sun-Young Kim Ji-young as Ji-young. Jong-goo Lee Profiler as Profiler. Na Hong-jin. More like this. Watch options.

Storyline Edit. Joong-ho is a dirty detective turned pimp in financial trouble as several of his girls have recently disappeared without clearing their debts. While trying to track them down, he finds a clue that the vanished girls were all called up by a same client whom one of his girls is meeting with right now. The hunter and the hunted, the ultimate chase begins. Action Crime Drama Thriller. Not Rated. Did you know Edit.

Actor Jung-woo Ha actually did slip on the slippery pavement while shooting, but kept running anyway. Last edited by Orzeka ; 6 Jun, pm. Restart the game over and it should boot right up without asking for a key.

Either relaunch as the post directly above yours says or if that doesn't work right click the entry in your Steam library for Demigod and select Show CD Keys. Please make sure you read the thread that you clicked instead of finding a title and just posting your spam. Per page: 15 30 Date Posted: 6 Jan, pm. Posts: Discussions Rules and Guidelines. Soundtrack Music. This game aged like milk.

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