Some movies bleed. Some movies howl. And then there’s The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil, which cannonballs straight into the cesspool of our pretensions about right and wrong and dares us to gulp it down. Lee Won-tae’s pit-fight of a thriller isn’t just a crime movie—it’s a baptism, but the water is curdled with blood, sweat, and the stink of men who mistake punishment for penance. This isn’t filmmaking—it’s a bare-knuckle sermon delivered from the gutter.
From the first crunch of bone, you know you’re not watching a parable about justice. You’re watching dogs gnawing on each other because the leash snapped and their owners are, as usual, nowhere to be seen. Here there’s no knight, no dragon—only monsters sizing up who gets to wear the hero’s mask tonight, and whether the audience will cheer or spit. And the real miracle? Lee never tips the scale. The audience is left squirming in the gray matter, torn between recoiling from the violence and salivating for the next blow, as if catharsis were just another flavor of addiction.
Ma Dong-seok—God, what a slab of primal cinema. He doesn’t act so much as erupt—he contains the movie, the way a dam contains a flood, and every second you’re watching him you’re wondering if this is the moment he’s going to crack and drown us all. There’s a kind of poetry to his brutality, a sick, exhilarating elegance to the way he charges through the frame—knuckles first, questions never. If justice is a gun, he’s the bullet nobody bothers to fire; he just leaps from the chamber on his own, shrieking down the barrel.
Kim Mu-yeol’s cop—Tae-suk—isn’t really fighting crime, he’s negotiating with the abyss. He looks at Ma and sees the man he’ll have to become to catch the devil, and you can feel the war in his eyes: is the badge a shield or just a shiny excuse? There are no straight shooters in this universe, only angles, and every one of them is crooked by necessity. Their partnership is less a dance and more a demolition derby, and, oh, how the audience wins.
And then we get our Devil: Kim Sung-kyu, whose killer is a glistening, inhuman nothingness—the pure void at the center of every moral hand-wringing. He’s the thing that stares back when you linger too long in the darkness, the reason “justice” and “vengeance” become the same word muttered in the dark. The film shudders with their collisions; every frame is tension, clenched so tightly you half-expect the projector to snap. It’s not a whodunit, it’s a whydowekeepdoingit—temptation, compromise, and blood on asphalt.
But Lee Won-tae doesn’t just serve you genre thrills on a silver platter—he dropkicks the tray across the room and dares you to lick the scraps. The cinematography is so intimate it verges on indecent, stripping nerves raw with every shot. Urban grime and artificial light combine into a new species of noir—sleek, edible, dangerous. The action scenes? Forget balletic wire-fu or plinky-plonky Hollywood choreography; these are the kind of brawls that leave scars on you. There are moments that edge toward cliché, yes, but if you’re noticing, it’s only because you’re desperate for something familiar to cling to as the film pummels you senseless.
And when you think it can’t push any further, it does—the sound design booms and rattles, scraping at your eardrums until morality itself sounds like a siren that won’t ever shut off. Every prop, every costume, every bruised cheek or blood-starred knuckle—these are the movie’s punctuation marks, and they’re all exclamation points.
Afterwards, you don’t feel righteous or cleansed; you feel contaminated, shaken—a little bit more suspicious of your own capacity for savagery and compromise. It’s more than a genre exercise—it’s a dare, a dirty confession shouted in a world that gets off on pretending everyone is either angel or devil. The real horror—delivered with a wink and a sneer—is that, by the end, you’re rooting for every last sinner on the screen.
The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil is very good only if you think surviving a tornado is “a brisk walk.” This is raw steak cinema, chewed up and spat back onto your plate. If you’re craving a movie with answers, watch a game show. If you want to remember the taste of adrenaline in your own saliva, step right up: this is the showdown you’ve been waiting for, and the winner never gets to wash his hands.
