Critics reviews

A Hard Day further demonstrates how the New Korean Cinema movement excels at mainstream genre films with excellent production and quality acting. In addition, it continues the tradition of the film movement that proceeded it, the Korean New Wave, by pushing beyond cultural taboos that previous generations could never have realized on screen. A Hard Day has taken a hard way and made it look fairly easy.

Kim keeps the chaos moving at a breathless tempo. The filmmaker's a remarkably fluid orchestrator of action kinetics, always springing his surprises a beat faster than one expects, only to occasionally slow things down so as to prevent the audience from acclimating to his quicksilver timing.

You may wonder how long the writer-director, Kim Seong-hun, can keep this Rube Goldberg machine going. By the time the dupe-hero is sliding that cadaver through an air duct at the funeral parlor where his dead mother is laid out, it's clear that Mr. Kim is just going to keep the gears greased and happily purring... [It's] a kinetically visceral, enjoyable nasty joy ride.

the experience of watching A Hard Day is equal parts the squeamish anxiety of waiting for it to be over, and objective admiration of the contraption... If A Hard Day's entrapments seems at times dependent upon some dubious decision-making on the parts of its characters, their orchestration is nevertheless airtight.

Kim understands that split-second timing is everything, and he has built a reasonably effective tension machine. But for a film that strives to be hard as nails, A Hard Day is more like cotton candy, crackling on the tongue and evaporating instantly.

Carefully orchestrated, beat for beat, the movie unfolds as a macabre comedy of errors and paranoia... Highlights include a mano a mano apartment brawl and an extended gag involving a coffin; amusingly, the director cited Almodóvar's Volver, or rather his speculation about the possible real-life aftermath of a key event in Volver, as an inspiration.

Though punctuated with skull-cracking combat scenes and propulsive chases, the pic doesn't indulge in the stomach-churning gore that saturates so many Korean actioners; in fact, it's the nerve-racking situation that faces our hard-luck protag, with its heady black humor, social satire and a touch of surrealism, that keeps audiences on the edge of their seats.