This week there was only 1 new Hollywood movie that my wife and I thought to just wait till it's available on streaming and this South Korean film which intrigued us. As we were having other activities on Saturday, we only got to see it yesterday after it was released few days before. All right then, why don't I just get to it?

Brief Story Line

Jeong-yoon (Park Ju-hyun - Drive, Zombie Detective TV series etc) was a young woman who had been living by herself and working hard to make ends meet. She did not have a lot of friends but one of them was a police Detective Park Ki-hoon (Kwak Si-yang - The Desperate Chase. Cafe Minamdang TV series etc).

When Jeong-yoon was crossing the street, she passed by a mysterious man later on revealed to be Jun-woo (Jeong Jae-hyun - Dear M TV series etc) who warned her that she would die in 6 hours. Despite her skepticisim, Jeong-yoon decided to find out if there was any truth to it.

So how would the story conclude? You could find out in this movie.

End of Brief Story Line

OK, from the brief synopsis available about this movie, the premise sounded very interesting. So we were both curious to see how the story would unfold. The first few minutes was quite promising when the lead cast met for the first time. Subsequently though, the movie moved in a very slow pace by showing personal life of Jeong-yoon. There was also the side story of police investigation which we could have easily guessed where it was heading. It might seem like a distraction, but it was important to the story development. 

However, as the story progressed, I felt that it was missing the element of suspense which should have been the best part in here. For a movie that was time sensitive like this, it lacked the intensity and we did not feel it to be suspenseful. The time count down was not truly felt and there was no rush feeling at all, and the affected people were just like going with the flow. Only in the last fifteen minutes or so that it got more exciting. And we also felt a bit weird for someone who just met a stranger for the first time to trust such statement. There was one scene that was shown towards the end which my wife pointed out should have been done earlier to justify the reasoning for Jeong-yoon going together with Jun-woo.

Although the mystery was interesting, but the execution could have been done better to make this movie more enjoyable. From the opening credits, we saw Japanese name of Takano Kazuaki mentioned which apparently was the writer of the novel (manga?) of the same title and has been adapted into a Japanese movie in 2008. Based on the information I gathered on the internet, that version seemed to make more sense and the story telling was better. Since I have not seen it yet, I could not give definite opinion that it was better, but I could imagine the logic was more convincing there. Anyway, this is the problem with remakes cause it could be hit and miss. The way I see it, this one was a miss cause even though it had intriguing premise, but there were plenty of things which were not properly done. 

To my personal opinion, it looked like the movie was banging on fans of Jeong Jae-hyun (member of famous K-POP group NCT) in his feature film debut. The main cast were decent enough and there were also support cast like Lee Soo-jung (Dream Maker. Master’s Delicacies TV series etc) as one of the detectives and few others. The film was directed by Lee Yoon-seok in what seem to be his directorial debut as he previously guest starred in various TV shows. It might be too challenging to direct a rather complex genre for the first time, and perhaps a romantic comedy/drama would have been more suitable. I saw his potential here with the frequent use of bright color and the lighter scenes towards the end.

Overall this was a film that I felt had a lot of potential, particularly with the intriguing plot. However the story telling and the lack of suspense was not great for such movie, which resulted to lack of satisfaction for me personally. The conclusion was pretty good, though the twist was not too surprising. So if you are fans of thriller/mystery, this might not be too satisfying. But if you are just here to watch Jae-hyun, then I think you would be delighted cause he is one of the main cast and had a lot of on-screen presence.

Mike's movie moments rating: 2.5 out of 5 stars