Tuesday, July 02, 2024

The Accidental Detective (2015)

Dae-man (Kwon Sang-woo) owns a comic store, but his real passion is blogging about solving crimes. He constantly closes the store early, or leaves his elementary school aged son in charge, so he can visit his friend Joon-Soo at the nearest precinct.

Then Dae-man goes out drinking with another mutual friend, and that friend's wife is dead in the apartment the next morning. Worse, Joon-Soo had helped her purchase a condo without her husband's knowledge, so it looks bad for him. His hope is that Dae-man can prove his innocence, but that's going to require convincing Joon-soo's boss, burnout former top cop Detective Noh, to let him help.

It's a buddy cop movie, the angry veteran cop with an eager rookie. Noh's got a rep as a badass, which Dae-man is at first awed by. There are multiple slow-motion shots of Noh walking with his long trenchcoat blowing around his legs dramatically in the wind. Which results in Dae-man trying to emulate him, to limited success.

What humor doesn't come from Noh insulting Dae-man (or Dae-man's occasional revenge pranks), comes from how much these guys seem to hate being married. Dae-man's wife is on his ass constantly, not without reason, about actually making enough money to support them and their two kids (she's a private tutor, for Detective Noh's kid, but I guess it doesn't pay enough.) Dae is always groveling and promising to do better, when he's not lying that he's busy at work. Noh mocks Dae-man for looking after his infant daughter, but he jumps when his wife cracks the whip just as readily. Her special ringtone on his phone is a blaring red alert alarm, and the picture is of a snarling tiger.

But the murders are all ultimately about unhappy marriages. Specifically, husbands being angry at their wives, so it's kind of an odd juxtaposition. I guess Dae and Noh still love their wives in spite of the apparent misery of their married lives.

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