Rob Price
Gutbrain Records
rob + gutbrain.com = email


2020 February 28 • Friday

The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil was an okay movie, suitable for watching on a plane or drunk in a hotel room.

It claims to be based on a true story but I would bet that almost all of it is made up.

The premise is that there's a serial killer going around serial killing people. And there's a hot-headed young cop who simply won't do what his boss tells him to do! And then there's a crime boss whose power is being tested, teetering on the brink of a turf war.

At just about the worst possible time—just like the kidnaping in Kurosawa's High and Low—the serial killer attacks the gangster, thinking he's just another random guy of the sort he likes to serial kill.

But, whoops, gangster guy is tough, fights back, both are injured, and now the cop has the only survivor and witness to this mass murdering psycho.

The hospitalization of the gangster weakens his position in the crime scene and makes him vulnerable to attack from his power-hungry rivals. (Peter Rabe could have done something good with this premise, and sort of already did with Kill the Boss Goodbye.)

The cop wants the gangster to help him catch the serial killer but the cop and the gangster hate each other and the gangster is interested in handling it his own way and isn't really interested in the legal niceties.

And believe it or not, nobody believes the cop that there even is a serial killer!

Bottom line is that it's not actually that exciting, despite being smartly filmed with nice use of color, having a decent score, and deft handling of action scenes.

The story isn't much and the characters are less. The serial killer is a walking plot device and the police officer is more annoying than anything else.

Without Ma Dong-seok in the role of the gangster, it wouldn't be worth watching. He has an intensity and a presence that enliven every scene he's in. Lucky for us, he's in a lot of scenes, and joins the ranks of great fictional gangsters such as Bob Hoskins in the The Long Good Friday or James Gandolfini's Tony Soprano.