The pandemic and a drunk-driving scandal kept this buddy cop comedy on the shelf. Now it's betting on familiar genre comforts

"The Ultimate Duo" starring Jung Ga-ram (left) and Bae Seong-woo (Acemaker Movieworks)
"The Ultimate Duo" starring Jung Ga-ram (left) and Bae Seong-woo (Acemaker Movieworks)

The COVID-19 pandemic wreaked havoc on the Korean film industry in ways that are still playing out.

One lasting aftermath has been a steady trickle of so-called "warehouse films" — productions that wrapped before the pandemic but sat on shelves for years as release schedules collapsed. By now, a three- or four-year interval between filming and release is pretty standard.

"The Ultimate Duo" makes those seem punctual. The crime comedy, which screened for reporters Wednesday at CGV Yongsan in Seoul, finished filming in 2019 and has been gathering dust for seven years since.

The pandemic wasn't the only thing working against it. Lead actor Bae Sung-woo — a career supporting player who's turned up in everything from "Veteran" to "Inside Men" — was caught driving under the influence in late 2020.

In a country where a celebrity's misconduct gets them scrubbed from public life overnight, the fallout was predictable. Bae dropped off the map, resurfacing only gradually through streaming projects before venturing back to the big screen.

"The Ultimate Duo" marks his first film press appearance since the incident.

"I'm just grateful the film is coming out at all," Bae said at Wednesday's press conference, joined by director Park Cheol-hwan and co-stars Jung Ga-ram, Jo Han-chul and Yoon Kyung-ho.

"The delay was on me. I carry that with me, and I plan to keep carrying it."

From left: actors Jo Han-chul, Jung Ga-ram, director Park Cheol-hwan, Yoon Kyung-ho and Bae Sung-woo pose at the press conference for "The Ultimate Duo" at CGV Yongsan in Seoul on Wednesday. (Yonhap)
From left: actors Jo Han-chul, Jung Ga-ram, director Park Cheol-hwan, Yoon Kyung-ho and Bae Sung-woo pose at the press conference for "The Ultimate Duo" at CGV Yongsan in Seoul on Wednesday. (Yonhap)

The film pairs Bae's Jae-hyuk — a hotshot detective long since demoted to a rural dead end — with Jung Ga-ram's Joong-ho, a rich-kid influencer turned rookie cop who rolls up to his first day in a sports car. The two take on a gruesome murder case, convinced the man behind bars (Yoon Kyung-ho) is innocent.

Director Park, making his feature debut after helming Disney+ series "Grid" and "The Dominant Species," drew from real-life Japanese criminal cases to build the plot.

"Korean cases have been pretty well picked over by now," he said. "So I stitched together several Japanese incidents and built from there."

The seven-year delay did leave a few marks in post.

"The biggest headache was the phones," the director said. "We cut as many scenes showing them as we could."

Jung, who completed his military service during the long wait, took it in stride.

"Seven years is a big number," he said. "But honestly it feels like I blinked and it was over."

Yoon Kyung-ho, who's recently won over Korean viewers through a popular variety show, goes full 180 here — trading his chatty, likable persona for a menacing suspect you can't quite read.

"I thought of him as an apex predator," Yoon said. "For the payoff to land, he needed to be genuinely repulsive up until the end."

As a genre exercise, "The Ultimate Duo" is a near-textbook buddy cop outing.

You sure know the template: a grizzled maverick paired with a hotheaded partner, the two of them bickering their way toward mutual respect and a solved case.

It's been the stuff of crowd-pleasers since at least "Lethal Weapon" (1987); the dynamic here more directly channels Martin Lawrence and Will Smith in "Bad Boys" (1995).

Korea has been doing its own off-brand version for ages — from the foundational "Two Cops" (1993) through "Midnight Runners" (2017) and the "Confidential Assignment" series, and in some measure the massively popular "The Roundup" franchise. By now, the well is pretty dry.

"The Ultimate Duo" dips into it anyway and lands exactly where you'd expect. It at least has the modest virtue of keeping things relatively small and grounded: no sprawling crime syndicates, no deep-state conspiracies pitting cops against shadowy coalitions of prosecutors and politicians, the kind of bloated contrivance Korean crime cinema can't seem to quit.

The acting offers occasional sparks — Bae is convincing as ever in the lead and Yoon's change of pace surprisingly chilling — along with a few thornier questions that could have been pushed further.

"The Ultimate Duo" opens in theaters April 2.


moonkihoon@heraldcorp.com