Big Deal

A bit late on this one, because I opted to stream the one Red Sox-Yankees game I could stream this last weekend on Friday, didn't feel like going out in the rain on Saturday, and maybe shouldn't have gone Sunday but there were no matinees Monday. Looks like there aren't even end-of-run matinees on Thursday, and it kind of makes me wonder if I should move Next Week in Tickets up to Thursday mornings, since clearly the multiplex schedule runs Thursday to Wednesday with the occasional matinee stragglers on Thursday rather than Friday to Thursday with some night-before previews on Thursday.

Anyway… Is there something to say about contrasting this with A Gilded Game? Just because I saw them about a month apart and they're both movies about investment banks/firms being bastards from the same general geographical area doesn't mean there's that much to compare. I think the Korean movie had a better handle on making its money moves look like interesting drama, I guess. Maybe it's notable that Big Deal, in the very capitalist South Korea, seems more interested in implying that this is an evil system, while A Gilded Game, which mostly takes place in Communist China with occasional excursions to Hong Kong, seems to get closer to "there are evil people inside this system, so be very careful!". Odd, considering.


Big Deal

* * ¾ (out of four)
Seen 8 June 2025 in AMC Causeway Street #12 (first-run, laser DCP)
Where to stream it (when available)

An unrelated internet discussion I was reading the other day about pro-police propaganda in film was particularly fond of how Korean films were impressively full of corruption, and this presumption is throughout Big Deal, which does pretty well to make it "advanced financial engineering" which is full of skullduggery entertaining despite much of it being utterly inevitable. I don't know that one exactly enjoys the assumption that business and the law has a handful of good people trying to get by in a sea of jerks, but one sure relates to it.

The decent person here is Pyo Jong-rok (Yoo Hai-jin), chief financial officer for Gukbo Soju, which makes the most popular brand of soju in South Korea (which has the highest per-capita alcohol consumption on the planet) but is on the verge of bankruptcy during the Asian financial crisis of 1997 because chairman Seok Jin-woo (Son Hyun-joo) has expanded and diversified recklessly. Lawyer Goo Young-mo (Choi Young-jun) suggests a new procedure that would give them five years to reorganize and pay off principal, and the company hires international firm Soljun Finance as consultants, who choose young Korean-born analyst Choi In-beom (Lee Je-hoon) to run point (though he hasn't been home for ten years), reporting to Hong Kong office head Gordon (Byron Mann), with the promise of heading up a Soljun Korea office if successful. Unbeknownst to Pyo and Seok, though, success doesn't mean a steady, resurgent Gukbo, but Soljun taking operational control and making money off an inflated valuation.

The engine that makes this work, I think, is that Yoo Hai-jin's Pyo Jong-rok is a guy one can latch onto without necessarily being fully invested in his success; Pyo is too earnest for this movie and the filmmakers and actor know that, and it's that to their advantage. Things that might otherwise make one cry foul layer on work because he may have a chance of being fully effective against either the global reach of Soljun or Soek's casual corruption, but represents just enough to the audience that maybe he can exert some influence. On the other side, writer/director Choi Yun-jin and actor Lee Je-hoon do some nice work with In-beom; he's a smarmy little corporate punk, but both the way he reels at Korea's drinking culture and dropped comments about how he lost his father at about the time he left the peninsula ten years ago make one wonder if maybe a decade of hyper-capitalist mentors have warped him to the point of needing someone like Pyo to fill that void. It's seldom the actual text of the film, but it does make him a believable wild card.

There's a nice group around them, too, some of whom may go unheralded. Not Son Hyun-joo, who is entertaining as the sort of petty tyrant one hisses at but with a tension that comes from knowing examples of this sort of jerk, nor Byron Mann as an avatar of pure smarm where you're never quite sure whether he's merely using In-beom from the start or genuinely likes the kid but is too purely amoral to let that concern him. But Choi Young-jun makes Koo professionally self-effacing where others wouldn't, and holds later scenes without really changing his aspect that much, while Kim Ki-hae needs to be practically invisible until you remember he's been around all along.

For a movie about financial crime, the story is pretty decent, neither complicated to the point of being boring or impenetrable nor too simple for characters to miss (in part because the guys smart enough to see it are mercenary enough to switch sides). It's got an egregious flashback to try to explain things, and some late-movie twists that may work better for folks familiar with the Korean court system (or turn-of-the-century scandals), and something that seems too well set-up to be a red herring. But, at heart, the filmmakers know what the emotion at its heart is (that the people who try to do a job and those that try to make money fundamentally don't understand each other), and mostly how to let the audience know they know rather than deliver a lecture.

The lecture is inevitable, of course, from dialog about how a person can't beat money and closing credits that point out it's 25 years later and we're still dealing with this sort of nonsense, after a strung-out early-credits scene that makes sure we understand the path to happiness. Choi is able to use his two main characters as counterweights to steer between being cynical and idealistic, for the most part, which may not be the best way to hammer home his message but may be the best way for it to reach the mainstream.