WILD CARD

SATURDAY 25 OCTOBER AT 8:15PM UGC SHAFTESBURY AVE SCREEN 2

Country South Korea Running Time 105 mins Format 35mm Dir Yu-jin Kim Prod Geun-ho Shin S'play Manhui Lee DoP Hee-Seong Byeon Cast Dong-kun Yang, Jin-yeong Jeong, Chae-young Han Print Source Cinema Service T +82 2 2192 8734 W www.cinemaservice.com

Oh and Jay-Soo are maverick cops. So far, so ordinary - but Wild Card is anything but an ordinary cop movie, its pace, emotional tone and layering of comedy and tragedy strikingly at odds with the genre.

Oh is a calm centre for Jay-Soo, who is younger and more impressionable, to move around, and it's the tension between their worldviews that forms a recurring motif in which the ideas of justice and retribution are developed.

In Wild Card, even peripheral characters such as violent cop Chil-Sun, have considerable hidden depth. Oh and Jay- Soo's romantic lives are parallel - Oh's wife and Jay-Soo's girlfriend Nana completely in charge of their men.

Though Wild Card has a lot in common - in terms of how it depicts cops, their social rules and the criminals they move among - with other Korean films, it's unusually rich in humour, and the violence is unheralded and at times truly shocking. What's most striking is the layering of humour and tragedy, such as when a girl has to sing karaoke for her life as her friend gets cold at her feet. The direction is hard, taut, the film constantly moving from the start and never letting up. Funny, violent, and full of very real people, Wild Card is Korean filmmaking at its best. NS

Yu-Jun Kim is a well-known and respected figure within the South Korean film industry, having been an art director, writer and director since 1976. His directorial career began in 1986 with Love Song of a Hero, and includes Island of Shiloh and Seven Reasons Why Beer is Better than a Lover.