(Naean-ui Geunom)
South Korea. 2019.
Crew
Director – Kang Hyo-jin, Screenplay – Jo Joong-hoon, Kang Hyo-jin & Shin Han-sol, Producer – Lee Seung-hyo, Photography – Son Sam-ung. Production Company – Echo Film Company.
Cast
Jung Jin-young (Kim Dong-hyun), Ra Mi-ran (Oh Mi-Sun), Park Sung-woong (Jang Pan-soo), Lee Jun-hyeok (Bang Man Chul), Lee Soo-min (Oh Hyun-jung), Kim Kwang-kyu (Kim Jong-ki), Kim Hyun-mok (Kim Jae-ik), Park Kyung-hye (Jae-hee), Yoon Kyung-ho (Boss Yang)
Plot
Bullied teenager Kim Dong-hyun is forced to climb out on the ledge of the school building to retrieve a shoe for fellow pupil Oh Hyun-jung. However, he falls – only to land on gangster Jang Pan-soo on the street below. Pan-soo comes around in hospital to discover he is now in Dong-hyun’s body, while his own body with Dong-hyun’s mind in it lies in a coma. As Dyong-hun, Pan-soo has difficulty adjusting to school life but decides to make changes by beating up Dong-hyun’s bullies and getting in shape. He then discovers that Hyun-jung is the daughter of Oh Mi-Sun, the girlfriend he walked out on seventeen years ago. With this comes the realisation that he is Hyun-jung’s father. He tries to reconnect with Mi-sun. Problems are compounded when Dong-hyun comes around in Pan-soo’s body and has fellow mobsters pursue, wanting to kill him.
With an English-language title that sounds like it is either a Jeff Bridges autobiography, a gay porn film or else some really dated self-realisation film about a guy reclaiming his masculinity, what The Dude in Me doesn’t suggest at all is the very tough genre of the South Korean gangster film. The South Korean gangster film is a genre that has become its own entity since the early 2000s. It was clearly inspired by the Hong Kong gangster film of the 1990s but has gained its own life, producing classic works such as A Bittersweet Life (2005), A Dirty Carnival (20060, The Man from Nowhere (2010), New World (2013), The Outlaws (2017) and Night in Paradise (2021), among a good many others.
It may be that as the 2020s are rolling around that the Korean gangster film is starting to run out of creative steam as a genre and that turning to genre material is a way of adding new ideas to the mix. The Dude in Me is a bizarre crosshatch of the Korean gangster film and the bodyswap film, a genre that began in 1940s light fantasies wherein two mismatched people end up swapping bodies. This is usually played as comedy as in the likes of Turnabout (1940), Freaky Friday (1976), Like Father, Like Son (1987) and Vice Versa (1988). (I have a more detailed listing of these here at Bodyswap and Identity Exchange Films).
Not long after this, there was also the South Korean Spiritwalker (2020) about a gangster who wakes up inside a different person’s body every twelve hours. In a lighter vein there was the subsequent Korean films Switch (2023) where a pop star and a taxi driver swap places and before both of these Daddy You, Daughter Me (2017) where a father and his daughter swap bodies.
Despite such an intriguing premise, The Dude in Me plays out unadventurously. For one, it is only focused on the gangster in the nerdy teenager’s body and how his toughness turns the teen’s life around. Even then, most of the story is a romantic one about the gangster in the teen’s body connecting with the woman (Ra Mi-ran) he walked out on years ago. Conveniently, the teenager trapped in the gangster’s body remains in a coma until about the last quarter of the film meaning that we only see one side of the equation for almost the whole film. It may say there is something seriously wrong going on in the Korean school system when a bullied nerd can only gain his comeuppance by employing the tactics of a gangster.
Even as such, the film seems way too long at 122 minutes and the pace drags. All of the abovementioned bodyswap films play out on the comic contrasts between the two swapped characters’ lives but director Kang Hyo-in forgets the comedy element and plays everything seriously. The film does offer the advantage of some fairly tough unarmed combat scenes.
Trailer here