Leokki

This is such a funny feel good movie! I have not laughed this hard while watching a movie in years! I believe that everybody in the family can enjoy this one. The acting is great and the romance and comedy is pretty well-adjusted as well. I especially love the scenes that deal with the acting on set! The story is one that is well written, and there are a few twists. It deals with two people who switch life roles and get adjusted to each other's lifestyle in hilarious ways. This movie delivers in a big way! Highly recommend!

Terrific cast, direction, and writing with wonderful plot flips, themes, and perfect timing. Leokki manages to be funny, sweet, and warmly charming in one delightful film. Strongly recommended.

A efective comedy. Love how it laughs about the K-Dramas clichés. Yoo Hae- Jin perfomance (as the profesional killer) was my favorite. He is so expressive and is not exactly a hegemonic Korean beauty which makes us love more their role. There was moments that I felt that the character deserved hug.

The 'Body Switch' genre in which two very different characters swap identities is very common in American cinema. If you aren't familiar then think of any film from the eighties, where Tom Hanks played an adult with the mind of a teenager in Big. Or Freaky Friday, The Parent Trap, 17 Again…

It seems that South Korean directors love the genre too. So much so that there has been a spate of films where a character takes on the physical identity of someone else, for comic or dramatic effect. (Some recent examples: The Beauty Inside (2015), Masquerade (2012), and Miss Granny (2014). This was pointed out during the recent Korean Cinema conference. My guess is that in a society based on strict Confucian rules, individuality is not desired, so people long to escape these narrow confines and to be someone else. So when a down and out actor takes a suave hit-man's locker key in a bath-house, we're all set for a hilarious comedy where the lives are reversed: the loser (Jaesing) becomes the hit-man and the hit-man (Hyung-wook) starts living the life of the struggling actor who is behind with the rent on his sad-sack loft apartment.

After waking up from his concussion, Hyung-wook is too poor to pay for his medical treatment and has to borrow money from the kindly Rina (Yun-hie Jo), who works as a TV agent. He moves into Jaesing's trash filled apartment. Meanwhile, newly rich Jaesing soon pays off his debts and lives the high life in a luxury penthouse where he discovers a stash of weapons as well as a surveillance camera which is fixed 24 hours on an attractive woman in the apartment above.

The hit man soon endears himself to Rina and her family, and when he starts working at her mother's snack bar he wows the customers with his astonishing knife play. What's funny here is that the tough guy can't understand where he picked up these skills, or how he is able to put his new neighbour in a headlock and throw him to the ground when he tries to start a fight. Whenever someone asks his age he can't keep a straight face, because he looks so much older. Haejin has a wonderfully expressive face: whenever he is told to smile he looks as though he is about to dispatch his next victim.

When he discovers that Jae-sing is an actor (usually as an extra in TV melodramas), he goes to the set and soon impresses the director with his realistic fighting ability. He becomes better at acting than his predecessor, moving from one-line parts to becoming the lead in a corny television drama that ends each episode with ridiculous cliffhangers (if you have ever watched a Korean TV drama, you will know what I mean).

I went in to this film not knowing anything about the story or with any expectations and when I finished watching I was pleasantly surprised. With so much advance hype and spoilers being regularly leaked, its possible to watch a film with no surprises or real excitement. That's a shame, and a good reason to watch international cinema more often.

In a world full of doom and gloom, this was incredibly refreshing. I was not expecting to laugh or cry, but I got plenty of both.

Hard to see how anyone couldn't love this, the acting was on point, and it's human moments were heart felt and touching.

The economic polarity expressed hit home for me and had me intrigued right off the bat, and I have to say the cast suited the roles quite well. A very broad array of emotions came out of me. Great acting all around - the corniness threw me off from what I'm using to seeing out of Korea but I enjoyed the chuckles.

Korean culture has such an elegant aura. 10 stars!