[K-Movie Night] Midnight Runners

by Dramaddictally

Welcome to K-Movie Night — a once-a-month feature where we microwave some popcorn, put on a face mask, and get cozy with a Korean movie from yesteryear. With so many films finally streaming (with subs!), now is the time to get caught up on all those movies we missed featuring our favorite drama actors.

Each month, we’ll pick a flick, write a review, and meet you back here to discuss whether or not it’s worth a watch. Super simple. All you have to do is kick up your feet and join us in the comments!

 
MOVIE REVIEW

This month’s pick was plucked straight from the comment section of an earlier K-movie Night (thanks @midnight for the suggestion!) and comes just at the right time. Nothing says summer like action movies, and we all know it’s never the wrong season to have Park Seo-joon and Kang Haneul on our screens. Plus, with the new drama Bloodhounds that premiered on June 9 by the same writer/director (Kim Joo-hwan a.k.a. Jason Kim), now is a perfect chance to check out the filmmaker’s earlier work.

Released in 2017, Midnight Runners was a summer blockbuster in Korea, becoming one of the highest grossing films of the year. It marked Park Seo-joon’s first lead role in a movie, and got him lots of attention at the awards shows that year. With action, comedy, crime, and a couple of cute-faced cops, I set out to see what all the fuss was about.

The first thing to know about this movie is that it’s essentially a light-hearted story told very darkly. And by dark, I mean everything from the lighting to the themes. We start with a pair of kids, fresh out of high school, entering the police academy. We learn that neither has a real profound reason for being there — one is from a poor family and wants the free education, while the other just doesn’t want to follow the same collegial path as everyone he knows. And so, here they are, a couple of unlikely heroes that have no idea what’s in store for them.

As the story takes shape, the arc of our leads will drive them to find a purpose within the academy, but also to discover what real-world police work is like. In short, it’s full of bureaucrats more concerned with following procedure than with saving lives. But right from the beginning, we see our heroes are different.

The two become friends during the military-style boot camp they have to endure to enter the police program. Our first new recruit, KANG HEE-YEOL (Kang Haneul), falls and injures his ankle during a timed test to hike a brutal hill. And our second fresh-faced student, PARK KI-JOON (Park Seo-joon), is the only one who stops to help him.

Ki-joon carries Hee-yeol piggyback down to base, and though the two arrive late – and they believe they’ll be punished – it’s the other recruits who have failed the test. Even though the rest arrived on time, they ignored a person in need. As police officers, the first order of business is to help a fellow citizen.

And it’s this pattern that repeats itself in the overarching plot of the movie, as our two new besties get entangled in an organized crime syndicate, disobey their superior (played by the always excellent Sung Dong-il), and risk punishment in order to do the right thing.

Like many a story about male bonding, it all starts with a girl. Neither have any luck in the dating department and their personalities tell us a little about why. Hee-yeol is the nerdy and studious type, obsessed with hygiene, and afraid to eat sausage because of the carcinogens. Ki-joon, on the other hand, is a little dopey and mostly lets his appetite lead his decision-making — if there’s a meal involved, he’ll be there.

About 30 minutes in, our story picks up speed when our leads go to a fancy club in Gangnam, filled with celebrities (cameo by Chansung of 2PM), and can’t get a date there either. It’s partly that they’re not skilled or very cool (and these actors are hamming it up hardcore to make us believe this), and partly that the women are snobs (one asks Ki-joon as she’s walking away from him why he’d choose to be a police officer and be poor his whole life).

The failure at the club hits Ki-joon in the gut as he again questions his purpose in becoming a cop. These are the kinds of scenes that Park Seo-joon excels at and it’s no different here. We see him at his lowest moment, just as things are about to take off running — literally at midnight.

The primary action occurs over the course of one night after the boys leave that Gangnam club. They spot a pretty girl in the street (Lee Ho-jung), start to follow her with the intent to ask her out (and, yes, they know how creepy it probably seems), but then witness her knocked out with a bat and thrown into a van that speeds away.

Their instinct is to report it to the police — they’re police students after all and they have total trust in the system. But what they find is a backlog of cases, higher priority crimes (missing chaebol grandsons take precedence), and a general lack of passion for what they feel deserves immediate attention. The boys learned in class (and so did we as we followed them) that the first seven hours after a woman is abducted are the most critical because 70% of victims are killed within that timeframe.

From here, it’s a countdown. Our not-yet-rookie cops decide to take matters into their own hands and track down the girl before anything worse happens to her. The next hour or so finds them moving into the criminal underworld as they traipse through seedy parts of Seoul they never knew existed. What starts as a straight kidnapping story turns into an organized ring of abductions, human trafficking, sex crimes, organ extraction, and female egg harvesting. When I said it gets dark, I meant dark.

As far as buddy cop comedy-dramas go, though, this one fits the mold. If you’re here because you love the genre, it has everything you’d expect — from cringey jokes to bloody comedy to heroes that ultimately prevail. But even though the antagonists are stereotypical bad guys who lack depth, the scenes with the abducted women are quite disturbing. It’s not just that our heroes aren’t around to crack jokes in those scenes — and so they turn bleak quickly — but that the themes are real enough to warrant some thinking. And thinking is the last thing you want to do in a movie like this.

On the upside, the highly likable leads carry this movie from beginning to end with their oh-so-watchable bromance that’s at times laugh-out-loud funny. And if you’re in it for the possibility of a muscular chest or two, there’s that as well — especially when these rule-breaking bad boys are training for their last stand against the thugs. But, you’ll also have to endure watching them get beat to a pulp first.

In the end, this is a movie about growing up, facing the world, and watching our two young leads finding their purpose within the police force. Now that they’ve seen how it feels to save a life, they know for sure this is what they want to do.

For fans of the genre and all its associated tropes, this is a solid story that hits all the marks. It’s got good comic timing and understands the story it’s trying to tell. But with some darkly disturbing scenes and a tendency to lean into the crude, this isn’t a movie for everybody. More than once, I found myself reflexively turning away from the screen — and that’s saying something when most of the screen time includes fit men in fitted jeans.

Join us in July for the next K-Movie Night and let’s make a party of it! We’ll be watching Very Ordinary Couple (2013) and posting the review during the last week of the month.

Want to participate in the comments when it posts? You’ve got 3 weeks to watch! Rather wait for the review before you decide to stream it? We’ve got you covered.

 
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