Private Eye

I'd heard some positive things about Private Eye before actually catching the movie in the theater. A detective story set in the early 20th century under the Japanese colonial rule! With Hwang Jeong-min, Ryu Deok-hwan, Uhm Ji-won, Oh Dal-soo in the cast! And the screenplay picked up some kind of award! Well, the last bit was not so intriguing. It's not uncommon for an acclaimed screenplay to turn out to be disappointing. Still, the first two pieces of information were enough to get my expectations up.

The Private Eye The details of the story go like this. Hong Jin-ho, the character played by Hwang Jeong-min in this film, is a pro at things like tracking down missing people and exposing illicit love affairs. He doesn't call himself a private eye, but that's basically what he is. He usually tries to avoid tight situations but is one day pushed into a rather sticky murder case, when Jang Gwang-soo, a med student who collects abandoned bodies for dissection, asks Hong to find the murderer of his latest cadaver.

Wait. I mean, wouldn't it be obvious to a med school student that if you find a body with a knife wound in it, it was probably a victim of murder? The film begins to lose its footing this early on. The story wouldn't make sense even from the viewpoint of early 20th-century Seoulites. Any moderate reader among them would have been familiar with the ABCs of detective novels. This would have included a cadaver-hungry medical student, by the way. It could be that Jang was simply thinking that his actions were fine if the body belonged to some insignificant fellow, but less so if it turned out to be the son of a high-ranking official that spells out mortal danger for him-- but then the audience wouldn't be able to like him as much.

If it's all an excuse to bring together a private eye and a doctor-to-be as a murder investigation team, well, I can't say I don't understand. The folks who made this film were indeed aiming for a Holmes and Watson partnership, colonial Seoul-style. The names match somewhat, with a little stretch: Holmes - Hong Jin-ho, John Watson - Jang Gwang-soo, see? But there's a fatal flaw here. As you Baker Street Regulars already know, Holmes and Watson are highly distinctive characters. Just a few pages into the story and you know what kind of people they are. In Private Eye, it's much harder to figure out the two main characters. Especially Hong Jin-ho. What is he, anyway? A man of "the little gray cells" like Hercule Poirot? No, he's too dumb for that. Or an eclectic super-hero like his namesake Holmes? He doesn't have half the skills. Maybe a tough guy like Sam Spade? Not so. Hong can't hold up in a fistfight, nor does he have the guts to handle the life underground. Then why in the world is this man the hero?

Hong's plight springs from the fact that the film denies him a chance to reveal his unique features or skills. In other words, the screenplay was not very well thought out. The film doesn't have much mystery in it. There's no foreshadowing that lasts more than ten minutes, and most clues are explained away in the very next sequence. On top of that, there's just one suspect. Or were there two? In any case, there's no room for a detective to do anything, much less show himself off. Even that snazzy toy that looks like something Q might make for 007 is simply no good if the man doesn't get to use it.

And who makes these toys for Hong? It's the inventor Soon-duk, played by Uhm Ji-won. Soon-duk, although not very realistic, could have been an interesting character: a lady of noble birth that gets hooked on modern Western science and sets up a lab in an abandoned church to cook up all sorts of inventions. A personage of these dimensions might well be the heroine in a sensible screenplay, but here she remains underdeveloped and misused in a supporting role.

Another badly formulated character is the police officer Oh Young-dal. As always, Oh Dal-soo turns in a fun, top-notch comic performance, but his character really does not deserve such cutesy treatment. It's always a bad idea to put together in one character the roles of a harmless clown and an accomplice in crime. No amount of good acting on Oh Dal-soo's part can pull it off, however excellent an actor he may be.

The film attempts to cover up gaping holes in the story and characters with action scenes, but those aren't so well-crafted either. The chase scene between Hong and a mysterious pursuer is a glaring example. The city-stomping stunts on the fabulous open sets could have been "cool," or so the makers must have thought, but it did not work. The rhythm is awkward and the timing a mess. The entire sequence here is meant to end on a clear slapstick note, which might have looked good in the script. But where one second would have been enough, the film drags on for a few more seconds and the result is a boring scene. This is just one of many such unwise decisions. All in all, I don't believe that the makers of Private Eye are giving film as a medium its full workout.