Having starred in one of the worst remakes ever made when he took on Get Carter – something he’ll happily admit to – you’d have thought Sylvester Stallone would be wary of rehashing any more classics. And yet, it was nonetheless announced back in the summer of 2019 that he’d be producing an American version of Korean instant classic The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil.
Paramount ended up acquiring the rights to the project last year, and while there’s been no word on whether or not the veteran action icon is planning to star, the entire operation feels redundant when it’s never going to be anywhere near as good as an unsung modern masterpiece that found huge box office success on local shores and currently boasts respective Rotten Tomatoes approval ratings of 97 and 94 percent from critics and audiences.
One positive is that Ma Dong-seok (of Eternals fame) was in line to reprise his role in the do-over, but on the other side of the coin, that makes it feel even more redundant when there’s already a vastly superior spin on the story out there featuring the exact same actor playing the exact same part.
Either way, the fact FlixPatrol has named The Gangster, the Cop, the Devil as one of the top-viewed titles on Chili this week makes it clear that the original is more than capable of finding a new audience without a new coat of shiny Stateside paint.
The story finds a ruthless crime loss forging a sketchy alliance with a detective to catch a shared enemy; namely, a prolific serial killer who left Dong-seok’s Jang Dong-soo for dead. The enemy of the enemy is my friend sums up the narrative in a nutshell, but it’s so much more than that.
Published: Apr 22, 2023 01:47 am