Large scale con artistry is catching. Found all over American screens in 2015 and politics in 2016, the big con, or KHAAAAAAN! Wait, that’s something else. Anyway here’s the BIG CON, South Korean style, with Byung-hun Lee not-so-Magnificent this month, but again in the metaphorical saddle, nonetheless.
The One Network is headed by President Jin (Lee). Not unlike our con artist President, Jin loves to attend pro-Jin rallies in which he sells the masses on his grand schemes. The schemes never come to fruition for the masses, of course; Jin just takes the money – I think this is hard to do more than once from the presidential POV, but then, I wouldn’t have guessed a candidate could ridicule a disabled person and continue a presidential campaign, much less win one. The police are on to Jin, and isolate his architect, Park Jang-goon (Kim Woo-bin), for questioning. Park may be the brains of the operation, but demonstrates nerve over knowledge in an attempt to sell-out Jin and keep a tidy sum for himself.
You know how this works – Park’s attempt to gain treasure and freedom garners neither. With one near-fatal miscalculation, he goes from Park Place-woo! to Kim Jung-illin’. And when he emerges from the hospital, the populace has been defrauded, Jin
has escaped, and our Korean Poirot, Kim Jae-myung (Kang Dong-won), has been demoted. Can these two suckers get their act together to bring Jin down, wherever he may be?
Master is sort of like a Korean version of The Sting if Newman and Redford had substituted subplots for spreadsheets. There are a ton of numbers and business gambits tossed about as if IPOs, investments and economics were all common knowledge to the public. My guess is the title is a poor translation; Jin might be a Master con artist of sorts, but authorities are on to every scheme he pulls in this film, which would suggest otherwise. Would you call a nimble pickpocket or deft grifter a “Master?” Perhaps there’s something in the definition of the lord of a household playing on the iron hand Jin issues to garner fealty; not sold on that definition, either, when your right hand man is willing to sell out.
American audiences will almost stay away from this one; there are better versions of the company con (The Wolf of Wall Street, The Big Short, for two), and in some of them, you don’t even have to suffer subtitles. The film isn’t great, but it is entertaining and perhaps I’ll remember this a the season that Byung-hun Lee mastered good guy and bad guy in the same stretch.
♪How long have you been planning con?
How wrong is this tremendous con?
You’ve made friends on sev’ral occasions
In the dark to your ripe Ponzi scheme
Leaving funds all of their own volition
Cause they might be as dumb as they seem
And you said you were never intending
To skip out the country this way
But there ain’t any use in pretending
Your Learjet is fueled for Bombay
How long have you been planning con?
How wrong is this tremendous con? ♫
Not Rated, 143 Minutes
D: Cho Ui-seok
W: Cho Ui-seok, Kim Hyun-duk
Genre: Comeuppance
Type of person most likely to enjoy this film: Davids
Type of person least likely to enjoy this film: Goliath
♪ Parody inspired by “How Long Has This Been Going On?”
