Hard Days

Michihito Fujii’s remake is stressful, while eschewing much that might make it engaging.

“You seem relaxed for someone who just killed a man.”

Never have I heard such an obvious untruth in film dialogue before. All of Verbal Kint’s dialogue in The Usual Suspects was less untrue than this line delivered from a mysterious caller to corrupt cop Yuji Kudo (Junichi Okada), as he frantically tries to remove all traces of a crime he committed. Okada’s performance is a lot of things, but relaxed is certainly not it.

Detective Kudo is a man who’s had a pretty bad day. His mother is in the hospital, his wife is begging him to come before it’s too late. He’s already drunk, and internal affairs is on his ass for this and that. Things get worse when he runs over a man, and hides the body in his trunk and it culminates when his mother dies before he even had a chance to see her. Manically, he tries to hide evidence, going so far as to hide the body in the same casket as his mother, and just as things seem to be calming down, he gets a text claiming to know what he did.

Hard Days is a really frantic film that never stops once the opening credits have finished rolling, from one tense scene of cops almost discovering a corpse to an exhausting moment of Kudo trying to keep his crime hidden. It’s sort of uncomfortable in a way that, I think, is intentional. It’s designed to keep the audience feeling as stressed as its main character, and that by and large succeeds.

It’s also not a particularly strong film, though. Adapted from the Korean film A Hard Day, this version wants to go bigger and ramp up the drama but by doing so ends up veering wildly into the silly. Okada is a great actor, but this constant wild-eyed panic that he exerts throughout is pure ham, especially when compared to the far more composed and threatening performance by Go Ayano as the Internal Affairs detective hunting him down.

The plot is kinda rushed; hell, everything is kind of rushed. It’s not the most peaceful film watching experience, and there are certainly better films that do the high-tension-throughout schtick better than Hard Days. But this isn’t terrible, just sort of meh. It wants to be Korea, and bring that Bittersweet Life energy, the gangster violence that so strongly defines Korea’s best crime films. It just never quite succeeds. Hard Days is fine, but why bother when there’s already a better version of it out there?

Verdict: Offering some fairly nonstop tension, Hard Days puts us firmly in the shoes of its protagonist, but forgets to allow us to enjoy it.

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Overall entertainment: 5/10
Violence: 6/10
Sex: 0/10
Mystery: 4/10
Comedy moment: A good three or four
Oda’s body: Must in an absolute state

Hard Days (2023)
Also known as:
Japanese

Director: Michihito Fujii
Writer: Michihito Fujii

CAST

Junichi Okada – Yuji Kudo
Go Ayano – Takayuki Yazaki
Ryoko Hirosue – Misako Kudo
Hayato Isomura – Hajime Oda
Tetta Sugimoto – Mikio Awashima
Taro Suruga – Taichi Kugayama
Mario Kuroba – Yuki Matsuda
Ryusuke Komakine – Shohei Kawakami
Takashi Yamanaka – Masashi Kaji
Maho Yamada – Yukiko Uematsu
Kurumi Shimizu – Mayuko Kishitani
Akira Emoto – Yutaka Senba