“Midnight Runners” (청년경찰)

By Jae-Ha Kim
Substack
August 20, 2023

☆☆☆☆
Park Ki-joon (played by Park Seo-joon)
Kang Hee-yeol (played by Kang Ha-neul)
↑Note: Korean names denote the surname followed by the given name.

A thoroughly entertaining cop-buddy film, “Midnight Runners” does a great job of blending comedy with action, while delving into the world of human trafficking and organ harvesting. The film is driven by the camaraderie between musclehead Ki-joon (Park Seo-joon) and nerdy by-the-book Hee-yeol (Kan Ha-neul). Even in their most dire moments, the pair offer wry slapstick comedy that makes this movie appear less serious than it is.

Students at the prestigious Police University in Seoul, Ki-joon and Hee-yeol arrange to leave campus one evening with the goal of checking out a popular Gangnam nightclub. These relationship-challenged young men have one objective in mind: to find pretty girlfriends like some of their classmates. Though both are handsome with the kind of looks that in real life would draw women to them, here they play bumbling losers who no one is interested in. As they head back to their dorm room, they see a pretty girl who they verbally fight over. (Never mind that she hasn’t shown interest in them.) By the time they’re done arguing, they see her being dragged into a waiting van.

It’s obvious that filmmaker Jason Kim (aka Kim Joo-hwan) — who would go on to write and direct the Netflix original series “Bloodhounds” — has set up a parable about who will and won’t get immediate aid. When the students go to report the crime, no one will help them, because the entire police force has been dispatched to solve the kidnapping of a bureaucrat’s child. In other words, that person matters. This anonymous girl doesn’t.

Remembering what they learned in school — that a kidnapped woman who isn’t rescued within seven hours will most likely be killed by her abductors — and without help from the police or their superiors at school, they take matters into their own hands. By doing some astute and probably illegal detective work, they find out that she was underage and worked at an ear-cleaning sex parlor (!).

The kidnappers target young girls like her who are runaways and won’t be missed by anyone. Their cases will never be the high-profile kind that get an entire force’s attention. Is it believable that Hee-yeol and Ki-joon would risk their academic careers by defying their professor’s orders to let the professionals handle the case? Not really. But “Midnight Runners” makes a strong case that it’s outliers like these two who are needed to not only think outside the box, but to do what police officers are supposed to do: help those who need it.

For more on the human trafficking plot that drives this film, please check out my Spoiler Alert below.

Film Release: This 109-minute film released in South Korea on August 9, 2017. My family watched this on Prime Video, but it was super annoying. Even though I have a Prime Video subscription, it didn’t air commercial-free. It ran “free with ads on Freevee” on Prime Video, which I guess is some partnership that nets Prime Video some money (while annoying its paying subscribers). FWIW, I see that it is now on Viki and KOCOWA, so if you have subscriptions to either of those, watch it on one of those streaming platforms (where the subtitles will be better, too, I promise).

Spoiler Alert: In a 2018, the Korea Biomedical Review reported that:

South Koreans were one of the largest consumer groups of organ transplants in China, indirectly contributing to the unethical organ harvesting market there, speakers at a seminar said.

The teenage girl was kidnapped by human traffickers who targeted runaways. They injected them with fertility drugs and harvested their eggs to sell to desperate parents who believed they were buying eggs from a legitimate source. When the girls become too sick or stopped producing quality eggs, her organs were sold off and/or she was left to die.

This begs the ethical question: how is buying someone’s eggs morally different from purchasing someone’s organs? Even if it’s the person’s choice to do so — unlike these girls who were forced — this monetary exchange between the haves and the have nots is something that needs to be addressed more. And in its own way, “Midnight Runners” does exactly that.

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