A Violent Prosecutor

A Violent Prosecutor (검사외전, 2016) is a South Korean crime comedy written and directed by Lee Il-hyung. Its hero is Byun Jae-wook (Hwang Jung-min), a short-tempered prosecutor known for rough investigations and for pursuing the truth at any cost. When a small-time suspect dies during his interrogation, the evidence points at Byun. He is prosecuted and sentenced to 15 years.

In prison he is bullied at first. Many inmates were once put away by him, and the warden is in league with his enemies outside. Byun then turns to his wits instead of his fists. He teams up with Han Chi-won (Gang Dong-won), a charming, chameleonic con artist, to uncover who framed him and to plan a way back.

The film mixes courtroom drama, prison comedy and revenge thriller. It follows the familiar wrongly-imprisoned-man template that reviewers have compared to The Shawshank Redemption. Its energy comes from the odd-couple partnership and the star power of its leads. It was released in Korea on February 3, 2016, and became a major box-office hit.

At heart the film is a populist fantasy of accountability. A cartel linking political elites, big business and the judiciary protects itself by sacrificing a scapegoat. The film answers by having the scapegoat, helped by a trickster outside the system, turn that machinery's own tools against it.

It also asks whether a man who bent the rules in the name of justice can claim to be an innocent victim. Byun is not simply pure. His roughness is part of why he is vulnerable, and the film lets him own his misconduct while still insisting that the powerful face the truth.

One reading sees the film as pure star-driven entertainment, a crowd-pleasing revenge comedy. Another sees it as social satire about an untouchable legal and political elite, with the con man a figure of popular trickery against institutions. A third is more ambiguous. Byun is the system's product as much as its victim, so his guilty plea suggests that reform has to include self-judgment.

The film arrived in early 2016 and dominated the Korean box office. Film at Lincoln Center called it Korea's biggest hit of 2016 so far. It belongs to a strand of Korean cinema that uses genre entertainment to criticize collusion between the prosecution, politics and business. Letterboxd commentary noted its Shawshank-style setup of a lawyer railroaded for murder. Critics widely treated Gang Dong-won's con-man performance as the film's highlight.

Audiences in Korea turned out in huge numbers. Praise centered on the chemistry of Hwang Jung-min and Gang Dong-won, especially Gang's charismatic con-man performance, and on the brisk comic tone. IMDb users give it 6.7/10. Criticism focuses on a familiar, formulaic plot. The Hollywood Reporter saw it as a solid vehicle for Hwang that might do well in Asian markets but was unlikely to get a wide release elsewhere. The overall verdict is an entertaining, if conventional, crowd-pleaser carried by its cast.