NEW WORLD (Park Hoon-jeong). 134 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (March 22). For venues and times, see listings. Rating: NNNN
It’s an old story. There’s this massive criminal organization run by an uneasy alliance of quietly malevolent suits and openly homicidal hotheads. And deep inside, one undercover cop is trying to stay hidden while the entire syndicate rips itself apart to find him.
Park Hoon-jeong’s New World is the latest riff on this plot, and Park – who wrote Kim Ji-woon’s hyper-sadistic revenge thriller I Saw The Devil – is smart enough to indicate that he knows he’s working familiar ground, with little nods to Infernal Affairs and Johnnie To’s Election films. But he’s made a movie that can stand alongside its forebears with confidence.
Long-term mole Ja-sung (Lee Jung-jae) is doing his best to negotiate the bloody war of succession that follows the death of the Mob’s leader after a car wreck. This mostly means keeping his mercurial pal Jung (Hwang Jun-min, basically playing Gary Oldman in State Of Grace) from pissing off the wrong boss and getting them both killed, but of course Ja-sung is really reporting everyone’s movements to his handler (Oldboy’s Choi Min-sik, nicely dead-eyed).
Park keeps the various loyalties ambiguous and the tension simmering, and the action scenes are terrific. Lee’s affected calm contrasts nicely with Hwang’s explosive temper, and their scenes are the film’s strongest. If New World has a flaw, it’s that Park doesn’t quite know when to stop piling up his subplots.
But, hey, it worked in The Godfather.
