[HanCinema's Film Review] "Gentleman"

With less than a quarter million admissions at the South Korean box office back in the 2022 holiday season, "Gentleman" is the sort of movie that's interesting mainly in the sense that it was so unnoticed and completely forgotten. "Gentleman" stars Ju Ji-hoon as Hyeon-soo, a private detective who through a plot contrivance is able to investigate a big criminal conspiracy as if he were a prosecutor. Hwa-jin (played by Choi Sung-eun) is suspicious of Hyeon-soo, but never convincingly enough to make her seem as intelligent as every other character assumes.

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"Gentleman" is almost immediately in an awkward spot as regards its screenplay. The convoluted nature of Hyeon-soo's relationship with the police doesn't really add anything to the story, and accomplishes little save for padding the running time an extra half hour that it didn't especially need. I was a little surprised to learn that Kim Kyeong-won was the writer/director for this project, given that "The Artist: Reborn" is both an economical and genuinely clever movie with a premise never quite absurd enough to break the suspicion of disbelief.

By comparison, almost noone in "Gentleman" has anywhere near enough personality to sell some fairly cliched situations. We learn, for example, that Do-hoon (played by Park Sung-woong) is the corporate big shot behind the core conspiracy. Do-hoon never manages to be much more than a thug wearing a suit, beating up on the hired help with golf clubs just for the fun of it. Do-hoon is not a subtle person, despite his big crime allegedly being a fairly complex and nuanced one.

As for Hyeon-soo, his own motivations are so vague there's not really much he can do to sell the action aside from just standing around looking cool. "Gentleman" almost starts with an interesting idea by implying that Hyeon-soo is a master of disguise, but this largely just functions to try and make the premise plausible. We never actually see Hyeon-soo show any personality aside from being polite and standoffish.

This is all the script technically needs, but then that's a lot of the trouble with "Gentleman" overall. The concept is extremely obligatory, like some producer somewhere just really wanted to make a cerebral crime thriller with stylish characters and didn't especially care whether any of their actions made sense. There's remarkably little tension, for example, about Hyeon-soo's goofy little schemes ever being found out, because the stakes for him never amount to much more than being a moderate inconvenience.

The final, most obvious flaw of "Gentleman" is just the awful title. The Korean title is just that same English word, written in Korean characters. It's so generic that even eighteen months later, you're going to have trouble hunting down this film if you actually want to watch it because any search you could run will pull up a dozen unrelated titles. Although it's appropriate, in the end, that such a pointlessly generic movie should be done in by its equally generic title.

Written by William Schwartz

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"Gentleman" is directed by Kim Kyeong-won, and features Ju Ji-hoon, Park Sung-woong, Choi Sung-eun, Kang Hong-suk, Lee Dal, Park Hae-eun. Release date in Korea: 2022/12/28.