YADANG: THE SNITCH Review: Kang Ha-Neul Dares You To Say No To Drugs In Hwang Byeong-Gug’s New Crime Romp
Yadang: The Snitch arrives on Digital beginning September 9.
The U.S. trailer for Hwang Byeong-gug’s Yadang: The Snitch is really good. If you never read the synopsis then you would have never known what the precise story points were, perhaps apart from a vague logline.
This really just motivates me more in my drafting process here to be as obscure in the spoilers as I typically am – perhaps not to the point of my Ghost Killer review where I’m vague as fuck, but just enough to make what thoughts I can produce here into something readable. Indeed though, the plot does involve crime and cop procedural thrills and suspense, punctuated by a vibrant cast led by Kang Ha-neul who caught some attention late last year into this year for his role in the final chapter of Squid Game.
We meet Gang-soo (Kang) who after getting caught and arrested and imprisoned for a drug crime is then proffered by a prosecutor named Guan-hee (Yoo Hae-jin) to become a snitch for his office. The work is reciprocal in that Gang-soo liases between both sides of the law so that he can advance Guan-hee and raise his profile and arrest rate, while Gang-soo, for what it’s worth, stays away from the shit, out of jail, and on the right side of the law. Simultaneously, their operation also ends up stepping on the toes of Sang-jae (Park Hae-joon), a tenacious detective whose own unit has spent months staking out a specific gang of crooks.
Incidentally, those crooks are connected to the emergence of a new drug out of North Korea, and a network throughout Asia that soon perpetuates a hotel raid, exposing Soo-jin (Chae Won-Bin) a fallen celebrity, and Hoon (Ryu Kyung-Soo), the son of a politician with his eye on the presidency. This is where Hwang really starts squeezing the juice out of writer Kim Hyo-seok’s script with a story that yields corruption, close calls, tragedy, and comeuppance, all spanning a timeline of up to a year barring flashbacks near the top of the film that skip back several years earlier.
Yadang: The Snitch wasn’t a film I paid too much attention to at first except for early promo pieces ahead of its Korean release. That, at least in part, is the beauty of discovering how cool a film is, and I’d been familiar with co-star Yoo off-and-on from films like Public Enemy and Ryoo Seung-wan’s titilating crime thriller, The Unjust, and 2015’s Veteran in which he plays the villain’s sniveling footsoldier opposite Hwang Jung-min.
Kang’s role is fantastic in touching on his character and what makes him tick, and the physical and psychological toll he endures during the film’s propulsive series of events. Park’s character is the most unnerving with a role that definitely harkens back to the kind of dauntless cop we all admire, akin to films like Veteran and its most recent sequel, or even like one of Yoo’s earlier films starring Sol Kyung-gu, the aforementioned Public Enemy. Chae’s character is the most even-handed in that she has her shit together despite not having her shit together, and that type of mindset really does come handy in the second act.
There are other moving pieces on director Hwang’s field of play – not too many, but just enough to hold Yadang: The Snitch together for its two-hour duration, along with a hilarious mid-credits scene to top it all of. Yadang: The Snitch is a bustling, top-of-the-line crime thriller with a kinetic and suspenseful story, and energized by a great cast and a solid script, and I had a blast with it.
