This review below contains significant spoilers and adult content that may not be suitable for all audiences.
Watching a Korean film made ten years ago is like going back in time. Korea wasn’t always making gender-sensitive films. The Hallyu wave was peaking, but mainstream would be mainstream.
The Accidental Detective was made in 2015. Its Korean title is 탐정: 더 비기닝 (Tamjong: The Beginning). This is the same era when radical feminist films like “The Handmaiden” (2016) emerged. There is nothing much special about the story, which is loosely inspired by a Hitchcock film, “Strangers on a Train” (1951).
Critics accused Hitchcock of rampant and often violent misogyny. Compared to that, this Korean detective story is somewhat milder in tone. But it still is a story seen through a male gaze, primarily. And like many other mainstream films, this is what makes it a “comedy.”
The not-so-sharp humor entirely rests on wives tormenting their husbands, nagging them for money, and making them do household jobs. Other than that, there is nothing remotely funny in the film. It is basically a story of wives and their husbands, with a detective twist to it.
The Detective Plot
The story starts with Kang Dae-man sneaking out of his comic bookstore to the police station. He once failed the police exam because of his weak knees. One of his friends, Jun-su, has become a cop. He hopes vainly to land a job as a cop himself and attempts to give him clues and leads about cases. But almost every time, others kick him out.
Much of the first few minutes is just this, until a murder case arrives where he becomes the suspect himself. He passes out drinking one night at another friend’s home, only to wake up in the morning to discover his friend’s dead wife in the bedroom. In the turn of events, the police arrest Jun-su as the murderer.
He has a senior, Noh Tae-soo, who was demoted for killing criminals he was chasing. Dae-man begs to join him in the case to find out the truth. Tae-soo, visibly irritated with Dae-man’s presence, eventually accepts.
What follows then is a series of murders, with Dae-man coming up with his own explanations. The only problem is that the film never fully shows how he arrives at them. It just seems he has all the answers.
Usually, a detective story involves chasing after wrong options until reaching the twist in the climax, which reveals the truth. Here, it is almost always Dae-man’s “prophecies,” which Tae-soo dismisses in the beginning, only to find out they are actually happening.
The story, in short, feels flat. And that is all there is to the detective plot, other than it implicitly glorifying police violence.
A Mediocre Thriller
The film works slightly better as a thriller than as a detective story. Especially in the scene where the detective pair almost falls into the electrified water in the basement of a pet fish shop while chasing their suspect.
About halfway into the movie, the tension peaks here. Only after this do the duo seem more natural. They start tolerating each other better. It continues until the end of the film.
In the climax, Dae-man saves the last woman from being murdered. His prediction once again came right. He predicted there would be one more murder, and Tae-soo dismissed it as usual. But he arrives on the scene, surviving a murder attempt himself. They subdue the antagonists together.
With the real culprits caught, the court clears Jun-su of all charges. And the story wraps up.
The duo’s escape from electrocution is probably the only scene that makes the audience care about them. And it works out way better than the rest of the story.
The Underdeveloped Characters and the Wives
Dae-man and Tae-soo are the only characters who are fully written in the film. Except for them, every other character is, at best, half done. They exist in relation to them. In a way, the rest of the characters are either basically wives of the two central characters or the murderers.
Dae-man has a wife who happens to be the tutor of Tae-soo’s twin children. She constantly nags Dae-man for money and rebukes him for “trying to play a cop.” She gets enough screen time to illustrate the very familiar dynamics of a daydreaming husband and a struggling wife trying her best to make ends meet.
One day, she discovers Dae-man with Tae-soo and simply tells him how Tae-soo’s wife tortures him at home. Eventually, this is what the duo bonds over for the first time in the story. They both regret not earning enough to make their wives happy and compare them to wildcats and tigers. Dae-man says their fathers had it better.
Tae-soo’s wife appears on the screen for merely a minute or two. Except for them, the rest of the “wives” all start dropping dead, one by one—brutally murdered. None of their backstories gets more than a few seconds.
The film manages to turn them into persona non grata, without feeling the need to illustrate them as characters.
The Not-So-Subtle Sexism
At one point, Dae-man makes a sexist joke. He almost complains about the size of his wife’s breasts.
A random husband-wife couple joins the story in the end. The husband is in the same hospital ward as Dae-man. His wife is watching the news of “wife murderers.” After a while, she orders her badly injured husband—with bandages all over his hand—to “peel an orange” and leaves. Tae-soo sees this and sympathizes with the husband.
He previously made remarks like “so much for having balls” after hearing Dae-man does the dishes at home. In a nutshell, the idea of humor is all about this. And probably, the tagline that suits the film the best is “when the wife is killed, the husband is the murderer.”
Sung Dong-il and Kwon Sang-woo portrayed Tae-soo and Dae-man in the film. Both are veteran actors with many awards and accolades to their names. But it is nowhere their best project. The director, Kim Jeong-hoon, has a rather unremarkable portfolio. His only hit is The Pirates: The Last Royal Treasure (2022).
The film had a sequel three years later, titled “The Accidental Detective 2: In Action.” Both were moderate successes.
Earlier critics warned not to “expect a lot of originality” in the film. It is indeed full of clichés, but an okay watch for the average audience. It still misses a lot of things others expect in a Korean film.
In a number of ways, the misogyny is anti-intellectual. But above all, it hints toward the intricate connections between glorifying police violence and patriarchy. Mainstream films rarely fare better on those counts. All these institutions running our societies are linked together in the end. And it shines through the plot holes of what a “mainstream,” male-centric story is supposed to be or eventually becomes.
