Master

Fairly decent crime drama.

I’m not sure if it was because of the translation issue but I did find the story very linear.
Not as many twist and turns or side steps as you expect. It’s very straight forward.

It’s good guys go after bad guys, use one of the bad guys to set up other bad guys, bad guys find out, tries to deal with the traitor only for the traitor to become a good guy to take down the big bad guy.

It sounds like a tangle web being woven but it was not. The movie hit it beats with timing so perfect that you can set your own watch too it, and this does take away from some of the dramatic tension being built.

I enjoyed it, However. Was not the best laid out crime dramas I’ve seen. (Far too laid out).

It relies a lot on the characters rather than the story. Not a bad way to go as the characters are pretty on point and interesting to watch.

Lee Byung-hun was a good villain. One of those types that hides his criminal activities with good deeds and being a nice person, but will toss you under the bus in a heartbeat which is what he did to a lot of his employees and investors, in a way that’s very reflective to the real life economy issues going on in the world, and the movie gives us this romantic concept of how to fix the problem that you wished happen in real life.

The villain, becomes the obsession of one of those hard ass cops, this one is called Kim Jae-Myung, he runs a task force looking into the money coming out of the Won Network and dedicated to bringing down the dude that ruin so many peoples lives. A little different from other cold shoulder cops, it did not take long to chip away at the ice. This may have a lot to do with the actor playing this cop was too pretty to pull of the ruggedly handsome style that Bruce Willis and Mel Gibson got.

And then there is the main protagonist Park Jang Goon who is in a dilemma being stuck in-between loyalty to his family or betraying that loyalty to do the right thing, and once again the movie romanticizes a situation I see going far different in real life, but made for an interesting look at the moral compos.

So while Master had a weak formula that could be due to a bad English dub telling the tale or something, It is loaded with some interesting characters that make it worth wild.