Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage | aka Bad Police (2019) Review

“Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage” Korean Theatrical Poster

AKA: Bad Lieutenant
Director: Lee Jeong-Beom
Cast: Lee Sun-Kyun, Jeon So-Nee, Park Hae-Joon, Song Young-Chang, Park Byung-Eun, Kim Min-Jae, Jung Ga-Ram, Lee Yoo-Young, Kwon Han-Sol
Running Time: 127 min.

By Paul Bramhall

It’s been almost 10 years since director Lee Jeong-beom struck gold with his 2010 action thriller The Man from Nowhere. Made at a time when, looking back in retrospect, it was a golden era for Korean thrillers, Jeong-beom’s sophomore feature hit all of the right notes. The director would try to recreate the success of The Man from Nowhere 4 years later with No Tears for the Dead, once more sticking with the action thriller to craft a distinctly gloomier affair than its predecessor. Jeong-beom’s 2014 production is an uneven effort, containing one of the best action sequences of the decade in the form of a mid-film apartment shootout, while also recycling scenes wholesale from his previous effort. It may not have been perfect, but it was certainly indicative of a director looking to strike the balance between expertly crafted action sequences, and plots that aren’t afraid to explore some dark territory.

5 years on, and Jeong-beom is back in 2019 with Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage. The title takes the name of the main character, played by Lee Sun-kyun. A cop who’s as corrupt as they come, Sun-kyun’s ‘bad lieutenant’ (which was originally going to be the English title) clearly echoes Sol Kyung-gu’s similar character from the 2002 classic, Public Enemy. In the opening scene he’s teamed up with a small-time crook (Jung Ga-ram, Believer) to rob an ATM under the cover of night, and during the day he has to deal with Internal Affairs constantly breathing down his neck. Like more than one of the roles Sun-kyun has taken since his entertaining turn in 2013’s A Hard Day, the role allows him to plug into his frazzled cop under pressure persona, however at least here it’s not as gratuitous as his performance in the likes of The Advocate: A Missing Body.

It’s when he sets his sights on using Ga-ram to break into a police warehouse that things begin to go wrong. An unexpected explosion sends the warehouse up in flames, incinerating Ga-ram who’s still inside, and knocking Sun-kyun unconscious outside. Waking up in hospital Sun-kyun finds himself as the suspect behind the blast, however it turns out that Ga-ram wasn’t alone when he initially broke in, discovering some shady characters from a wealthy conglomerate attempting to destroy evidence which would clear them of corruption charges. When it comes to light that Ga-ram filmed his fellow visitors in the act, and sent the video to his tearaway girlfriend, both Sun-kyun and the conglomerates resident psycho (Park Hae-joon, Heart Blackened) find themselves in a race to get to her first.

While the plot of Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage differs significantly from The Man from Nowhere and No Tears for the Dead, it soon becomes clear that those differences only really stand out on paper. Onscreen, the plot acts as a framework to hang the same tropes we’ve seen before in Jeong-beom’s previous productions. The girl is played by Jeon Son-nee (After My Death), and eventually Sun-kyun becomes her protector, echoing the relationship between Won Bin and Kim Sae-ron in The Man from Nowhere. Song Young-chang (who, let me just put this out there, I’m sure has been killed more times onscreen than any other Korean actor), who played the villain running the organ trafficking ring in The Man from Nowhere, is also back as the villainous CEO of the conglomerate. Whereas last time he had a South East Asian assassin at his disposal, this time they’ve decided to keep it local, with the previously mentioned Park Hae-joon playing the eager to please right-hand man who isn’t afraid to get his hands dirty.

While it’s clear that Jeong-beom believes that the formula used in The Man from Nowhere was a winning one, this is after all the second time he’s now looked to recycle it, it’s also clear from his latest effort that you can’t strike gold twice by staying in the same spot. What I’d really like to see is for him to apply his talents to a different genre, however instead he’s become a director that seems to be stuck running back to the kitchen for the same ingredients each time, preparing them a little differently, then hoping no one notices. At its core Jung Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage is another riff on the theme of ‘flawed male character seeks to protect vulnerable female character, and in the process find redemption’.

While previously Jeong-beom’s concoctions have come with a heavy dose of action, often so good that it became possible to turn a blind eye to the weaker elements of the production, this time action is the one ingredient which is sourly missing. Clocking in at an unnecessarily long 125 minutes, Jeong-beom’s latest is also his longest production to date, giving us plenty of time to dwell on its shortcomings. One of my biggest complaints about The Man from Nowhere was how one dimensional the villains where, and almost 10 years on, Jeong-beom is still unable to write a fully realised villain. This time the excellent Song Young-chang is reduced to doing little more than belting out villainous cackles, and Hae-joon is no better, with seemingly the only motivation behind doing what he does being to please Young-chang (and of course, the fact that he enjoys hurting others, because that makes him that little bit extra bad).

Like far too many Korean thrillers in recent years, Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage spends too much of its time feeling like a ‘greatest hits’ of other, better titles, than it does one that wants to have its own identity. The ‘dawning rage’ the title alludes to is representative of Sun-kyun’s shift to someone who’s willing to do the right thing, no matter what the cost, but it’s clumsily handled. Suddenly finding himself angered at an unlicensed doctors assumption that he’s Son-nee’s pimp, the beating he proceeds to unleash on the doctor is also one that’s felt by the audience, as the scene is overly-obvious in its intention to signal the change in Sun-kyun.

Perhaps in an effort to differentiate itself from other Korean thrillers of the same ilk, the one aspect of Jeong-beom’s latest that does feel fresh is its Ansan setting. When the Sewol ferry disaster occurred in 2014, of the 304 deaths, 250 of them were high school students studying in Ansan. The plot directly references the incident, with Sun-kyun meeting a father who lost a daughter over the course of his investigations, and Son-nee herself traumatised by losing one of her best friends in the sinking. It’s the first time for me to see the incident directly integrated into the plot of a mainstream production, and it left me with mixed feelings. The topic was handled respectfully, so if I can put my finger on it, I’d say it was probably seeing such a recent tragedy only used in the context of providing a setting, rather than it being the main plot that made me feel slightly uncomfortable.

Proceedings don’t get any better as the finale approaches, with the bizarre decision to include not one but two flashback scenes that play back-to-back completely knocking off the pacing, while adding nothing to build up the anticipation. The flashbacks are indicative of one of the biggest flaws in the bloated runtime, and that’s that there’s simply too much going on. We have a police officer who’s corrupt, we also have a big conglomerate that’s corrupt as well, we have family drama and tragedy based on real events, runaway teens with nowhere to go, the politics of the police station, and oh, in case you forgot a guy got burnt to a crisp somewhere along the way as well. What Jeong-beom’s script could have benefited from was some focus, but by trying to cover too many themes, what’s left is an overlong unwieldy mess.

There was a time when I eagerly looked forward to whatever Jeong-beom was going to do next, however with Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage it feels like that time has now passed. Perhaps it’s a lack of confidence to move out of his comfort zone and try something different, as he’s now made a very similar movie three times, with each one being gradually less entertaining than the last. While A Hard Day meets The Man from Nowhere may sound like an exciting prospect on paper, onscreen it feels tired and overly familiar. When you’re working in a genre that’s already saturated, those feelings are only personified. If Jo Pil-ho: The Dawning Rage serves one purpose, then perhaps it’s to remind us of just how good those movies it riffs on really were. Now, time for me to dig out my copy of Public Enemy.

Paul Bramhall’s Rating: 5/10