The Swindlers

The Swindlers (Kkun, 2017) is the directorial debut of Jang Chang-won, who also wrote it. It is a South Korean crime-comedy heist film. A news report announces the death of Jang Doo-chil, a notorious con artist who once turned the country upside down. Rumors soon spread that he is still alive, and that powerful figures who once protected him may have set him free.

Ji-sung is a swindler who specializes in conning other con artists. He insists Jang is alive and takes a plan to catch him to Prosecutor Park Hee-soo, who is handling the case. Park secretly assembles an off-the-books team of skilled scammers, including Go Seok-dong, Choon-ja and Chief Kim. Together they set out to run a con on the man who is the master of cons.

The film is built on the Ocean's Eleven template of a multi-star caper, with layered schemes, disguises and reversals. Its tone is brisk and humorous, and it is backed by a revenge motive and the shadow of political corruption.

The film argues that in a system where the powerful are protected, justice may only be reachable through the same deceit the powerful use. The film treats the con as a moral instrument. Its heroes are criminals who aim their skills at someone worse, and in doing so they expose the greater fraud of the politicians and officials who shield a swindler.

It also celebrates teamwork and trust among outcasts. Ji-sung starts as a solitary trickster driven by personal grievance. The mission turns a group of mismatched professionals into a team. The message is that deception can serve truth, and that real trust is the one thing a con artist cannot fake.

The film can be read as a light genre entertainment whose plot twists are its whole purpose. It can also be read as political satire in which con artists are more honest than the officials and politicians they target. A third reading sees it as a story of personal revenge disguised as a caper, with the group dynamic offering a surrogate family.

The film belongs to the wave of Korean cons-and-heists that borrow from Hollywood's multi-star caper tradition. Reviewers explicitly compared it to the Ocean's Eleven series. It performed solidly at the box office: Wikipedia gives US$28.9 million, and Baidu gives about 4.02 million admissions. The story's political backdrop of protected elites and a fraud victimizing tens of thousands resonates with Korean public anger at white-collar crime. Critical reaction was mixed, and some foreign reviewers found it weaker than its genre peers.

On IMDb the film holds a 6.6/10 rating from roughly 2,700 votes. Audience comments praise its fast pace, plot twists, funny scenes and its ending, and some call it a good way to pass time. Critics are more divided. Asian Movie Pulse liked its multilayered storyline and fast start. Roger Ebert's site was harsher, calling some of the expository dialogue tin-eared and the film uneven, although it conceded that subtitles may have dulled the dialogue. The verdict is an entertaining but familiar caper that works best if you do not think too hard about it.