Kidnapping a child has gotta be one the easiest ways to get an audience against you, no? While I’ve been disabused of all sorts of things I thought should be one-sided: gun violence, right to privacy, treason, etc., I think we can still all agree that kidnapping children is a bad thing and a problem to be resolved… well, that is until Trump does it. Just wait.
So-eun (Lee Jung-hyun) is a cop and single mom. She’s part of an investigation where a young child has been kidnapped. The kidnappers want to deal with a mom. Well, gee, I can only see two major plot points marching down Broadway from here. Hold up; they probably don’t have “Broadway” in Seoul. Well, gee, I can only see two major plot points marching down Myeongdong from here.
Still, a kidnapping is compelling, especially when it seems the perpetrators are professionals. Apparently this is part of a serial kidnap scheme (They have that? How can that possibly be a thing?) and the kidnappers
instantly know that the So-eun is an undercover cop. Hmmm, that speaks to either impressive surveillance or an inside job or both.
Or it could just speak to egregious policing. In fact, Limit neither lacks for shoddy detective work nor shitty police training. I mean, how else could you justify “serial kidnapping?” What’s important to note here is that the criminals are big jerks and deserve the justice they have comin’ to ‘em.
Limit is very watchable without being terribly good. I was genuinely interested in the children returning to their parents, intact, and for uppance to come as swiftly and destructively as possible. I can’t say that about every crime procedural I saw last year. But there ain’t a whole lot to this film and after the good stuff you really do wonder if South Korean police have some sort of awful reputation we don’t know about. What, did BTS get kidnapped at some point? I may never know.
Some hooligans abducted a child
And a parent or two got riled
Yet the evil in this fray
Managed to get away
The cause: detective-work, most mild
Rated 16+, 87 Minutes
Director: Lee Seung-Joon
Writer: Hisashi Nozawa
Genre: Botched policework
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Police procedural note-takers
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Actual police
