Asura: The City of Madness

Asura: The City of Madness

If you’re a fan of fictional cities in movies where corruption runs rampant and nobody is innocent your Twin Peaks, your Sin City, your wherever the hell “U Turn” was set then Annam, the metropolis at the heart of “Asura: The City of Madness,” will be a welcome addition to your list. This South Korean crime drama from Kim Sung-su is deeply dark and ultra-violent, with a story so packed with back stabbings, double-crosses and dirty officials that even the most fervent genre enthusiasts might find it relentlessly grim and cynical for their tastes.

Our first look at Annam’s desolate cityscape isn’t much to look at, but we soon learn that with the recent departure of an American military base, there’s now a lot of real estate to cash in on. But corrupt Mayor Park Sun-bae (Hwang Jung-min) has decided that he’d like to personally pocket as much of those profits as possible, and he’s more than happy to obliterate anyone who dares stand in his way.

Helping him carry out his whims is Detective Han Do-kyung (Jung Woo-Sung), a misanthropic cop who does his dirty work and is about to leave the force officially becoming one of Park’s employees. So when things go as wrong as they can possibly go in the wake of an attack against someone bold enough to sue the mayor, prosecutor Kim (Kwak Do-won) blackmails Han into gathering evidence against Park for corruption within one week or else Kim will send him straight to jail.

You might think that Kim is some sort of noble crusader except it turns out he’s just following orders from his boss who happens to be working for Park’s enemies.

It sounds simple enough until complications quickly make Han’s life a blood-soaked nightmare. For starters, not only does Han have to deal with a terminally ill wife (whom he doesn’t actually love, or anyone else for that matter), but she also happens to be Park’s half-sister. Then there’s Sun-mo (Ju Ji-hun), an initially unsuspecting newbie cop whom Han enlists to help take down Park and get the necessary information.

At first seeming naive, Sun-mo takes Han’s tutelage a little too much to heart and ends up supplanting him as Park’s favorite after dispatching a couple of foes in an especially bonkers manner. Soon enough, there are so many people on the take with so many conflicting agendas that whenever Han walks into a room with more than three others in it, not only is it impossible to tell whether he’ll still be breathing five minutes later there’s a good chance everyone’s allegiances will have completely shifted by then as well.

Kim and Jung first worked together in the 1990s on “Beat” and “City of the Rising Sun,” which were also gangster movies but ones that, from their descriptions, seem to be more straightforward genre pieces about honor among thieves. Needless to say, none of that is here the world portrayed in “Asura” is less dog eat dog than it is dog strings along brutally tortures and then eats dog.

Not that any of the characters seem to be having much fun with their corruption before they meet their inevitable fates Han is consumed with anger and self-loathing; Park is barking mad; everyone else we see falls somewhere in between. It might get monotonous after a while, but Kim has a few aces up his sleeve. One such ace is his clever notion that Kim’s need for more information on Park proves to be in inverse proportion to Han’s ability to supply it once Sun-mo supplants him in the pecking order. There are also several killer action set pieces here, including one of the most hellacious car chases to hit the screen in some time.

“Asura: The City of Madness” probably isn’t for everybody its relentless bleakness, over the top violence and 136-minute running time may prove too much for many viewers after a while. But those with a taste for hard-boiled action, storylines populated by characters who aren’t exactly overflowing with moral rectitude and body counts that rise faster than apartment rents will likely get off on it.

They’ll certainly get off on the Grand Guignol finale, which sees the already large cast dramatically reduced during an extended sequence in which they go after each other with guns, machetes and hatchets until they’re all crawling through ever-widening pools of blood on the floor fortunately contained entirely within the walls of a funeral parlor, making the cleanup and transportation of corpses relatively easy. Trust me in the world of “Asura: The City of Madness,” this is about as close to common courtesy as things are ever liable to get.

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