Last Updated on September 28, 2020 by rob
Unemployed gamer Kwon (Ji Chang-wook) is a shining star in the online gaming world. Nicknamed ‘Captain Kwon’ he leads his squad of fellow players to victory against seemingly insurmountable odds. But in the real world young Kwon finds himself framed for the rape and murder of an underage girl. Escaping from prison Kwon finds himself rescued by his old gaming pals led by Mr. Hairy – an online monicker belying a sweet girl superhacker named Yeo-wool (Shim Eun-kyung) – whose investigations expose a vast conspiracy masterminded by none other than Kwon’s own lawyer Min (Oh Jeong-se).
To be honest I’m no great fan of cyberthrillers because there always seems to me something dramatically inert hardwired into this sub-genre. I can’t get excited at interminable shots of people tapping away at keyboards or the uninspired visual aesthetic of virtual cameras diving down computer cables into servers or whatever. So I had minimal expectations for Fabricated City despite having heard positive things. Well having seen it all I can say is that if we must have cyberthrillers then let them be like this! Right from its eye-popping video game opening as Cap and his squad – with names like Mr. Hairy, DEMOlition, negativeSpace and Yong_Guru – plunge from dropships while gunning down waves of heavily armed enemies in order to reach and defuse a bomb – a setpiece which both foreshadows the story’s climax and plays like a cross between Call of Duty and the beach landing from Edge of Tomorrow (2014) – this exhilarating hi-tech action thriller never lets up.
Writer/director Kwang-Hyun’s tale of whitehat hackers pitted against a blackhat villain shrewdly locates its cyber thrills not in some virtual matrix but in the real world, giving its action a thumpingly visceral impact as cars, drones, bugs, CCTV – in fact anything with a computer chip inside it – gets pressed into service as both sides do battle in a breathless series of “Now get out of that!” reversals of fortune. Yet the film’s genre blending – this is part crime drama, part prison movie, a cyber thriller and a pedal to the metal action movie – never overpowers our emotional investment in Chang-wook’s gamer, an innocent tossed into such a shockingly brutal situation that we’re in his corner cheering him on every step of the way – especially when his former training as a Taekwondo athlete means he can start punching back against his tormentors.
The film has an entertaining adversary in Jeong-se’s villainous lawyer Min, whose real job, far from defending those who most need it, is framing them on behalf of rich and influential clients who need alibis for the behaviour of their murderous children, something Min achieves through use of a vast server farm hidden behind his cramped office in which the floor and walls are giant interactive screens. The details of Min’s operation – this is a guy who employs his own cleanup and forensics team (the former to scrub the original crime scene of all evidence and keep the corpse in storage until needed, the latter to snatch DNA samples from whoever’s being framed and salt the new crime scene with their hair, blood and fingerprints) – make for a fascinatingly original twist on a familiar theme of South Korean cinema; that of the elite ruthlessly exploiting the poor.
But technology proves a double edged sword because Kwon and his pals are also watching and before you know it Min’s meticulously laid plans start going thrillingly awry. I particularly enjoyed the film’s gonzo plotting (reminiscent I thought of the WTF! plot of 2012’s superb Confession of Murder) and stylised reality of a modern city turned into one big hi-tech sandbox for our characters to play in. It’s a stylisation which at key moments pulls from the aesthetics of video games. A fight scene between Kwon and a gang of thugs blends our hero’s real world Taekwondo skills and heightened reactions honed from countless hours of gaming in strikingly impressionistic fashion. It looks stunning and yet never feels like mere stylistic affectation because the character traits powering it have been so indelibly underlined.
The opening in-game sequence is very clever in the way it establishes Kwon as a character who, much like Tom Cruise in Mission Impossible: Fallout, will always put the safety of the individual first even if it means risking the mission. It’s a trait nicely played out in the real world as the chivalrous Kwon can’t resist helping the female hairdresser being lined up by Min to be framed for murder from the thuggish behaviour of her boyfriend. As good as the action sequences are I really loved the film’s emotional pull. You feel it strongly in the early scenes of Kwon’s devoted mother who’s left alone to plead his innocence to a hostile public and even if none of Min’s team of hackers are especially deeply characterised, they’re mostly types defined by their individual techie skills (one of the sly gags here is the muscular appearance of these geeks in the game sequence that opens the film versus the reality when they all turn up to meet Kwon after he’s escaped from jail), what is strongly put across is the sense of them unfairly scorned by parents and society for their interests.
That gets our sympathy and there’s an innocence to the characters I found charming. No one here has special forces training or access to automatic weapons. This is both a hi-tech battle of wits and a moral struggle in which victory for the good guys means not just the defeat of the villain but validation for these supposed societal misfits of their worth (Kwon has a cleverly conceived speech that bookends the film which speaks to this very point). The film is nimble too in the way it sidesteps the cliché of an instant affair between Kwon and Yeo-wool, preferring instead to subtly show how the latter slowly comes out of her shell – a moment where the pair physically touch while changing car seats is handled with just the right degree of subtlety. The performances feel spot on too. Chang-wook really captures the sheer terror of a kid facing the overwhelming power of the state and the almighty ass kicking he visits on Min when he finally gets his hands on him feels hugely deserved.
Jeong-se has fun as the villain, equipped with an ominous facial scar and bringing a childlike malevolence to what could have been a dull cyber villain (it feels entirely appropriate given the film’s conspiratorial theme that although Min is set up as the big baddie he ultimately proves to be a mere employee of something much more sinister) and his resentment at Kwon’s lack of respect for the older generation supplies the film with one of its funniest moments. The muscle is provided here by the brutish ex-con Ma (Kim Sang-ho), who has Kwon beaten and raped while in prison and who finds himself sprung by Min with orders to bring the kid down. As a cheap hood with delusions of grandeur Sang-ho is amusing but retains a mean and vindictive edge that makes his face to face confrontations with Min genuinely menacing.
