Some times it takes a whole lot of chicken to catch criminals.
Extreme Job is a 2019 South Korean crime-comedy film, directed by Lee Byung-Hun.
The film focuses a team of quirky narcotics detectives down on their luck, who constantly fails to catch their targets and only succeeds in causing property damages and getting their cases stolen. Their boss gives them an ultimatum: solve a big case or the team gets disbanded.
Desperate to make the best of their last chance, they end up buying a failing chicken joint in a last-ditch attempt at surveilling and busting a gang of drug traffickers. Hilarity Ensues when the squad accidentally comes up with a special chicken recipe that unexpectedly turns the run-down restaurant into the new hottest eatery in the district, attracting attention from media, other law enforcement units, and even the very criminal cartel the team is hunting down.
Extreme Job proved to be both critically acclaimed and commercially successful in South Korea, becoming the highest-grossing Korean film of all time.
This film provides examples of:
- Accidental Pervert: Ma gets spotted by a neighborhood lady, who reports him to the cops for being a peeping tom.
- Brick Joke: At the start of the movie, during their botched attempted arrest of a middleman working for a gangster named Hong, the suspect ends up getting hit by a bus and nearly killed. Chief Inspector Choi jokes about this, saying that a transit bus ended catching their perp than them. Ma clarifies it was a village bus, Choi jokes that would be better than getting hit by a school bus. During Choi's squad's failed takedown of Hong on a visit to his mother, a school bus ends up T-boning Hong's car, leading to his arrest.
- Crouching Moron, Hidden Badass: The squad may be a group of idiots who can't investigate their way through a preschool missing cookie case, but as the final massive fight fully demonstrates, each of them is a consummate grade-A hardass of the highest degree. To wit:
- Inspector Go's nickname of 'Zombie' is not a metaphor for his career being dead and still going-it's a euphemism for his ability to shrug off massive wounds and still somehow get the goddamn job done, such as apprehending the primary antagonist in the boat scene.
- Detective Jang is impulsive, ditzy, and prone to using violence to get her way. She is also a multi-time Muay Thai champion who levels over a dozen criminals with aplomb.
- Detective Young-Ho may not be able to stakeout or roleplay for his life, but with his former background as a member of the elite UDT/SEAL Spec Ops unit of the Korean Navy, perhaps his talents were misused to begin with.
- Detective Ma's chicken recipe seems to be the only thing that looks remotely useful about him, given his verbal tics and strange mannerisms. Then we find out he is an ex-member of the national judo team and a hand-to-hand combat instructor.
- Detective Jae-Hoon is the baby of the bunch, a recent graduate who has no idea what he is doing. But as a former member of the Korean high school baseball teams, apparently he knows his way around massive fights as well as anyone.
- Da Chief: Go's team report to a chief who's had enough of their antics and inability to close even straightforward cases. However, he's quick to claim credit when they make an enormous bust in the end.
- Fingertip Drug Analysis:
- Jae-hoon stupidly tries this to see if it actually works and ends up ridiculously high.
- A member of Ted Chang's gang tests Lee Moo-bae's product by stabbing bags full of drugs and licking up significant qualities. He notes that it's grade-a stuff.
- Foreign Culture Fetish: Ted Chang has a thing for American culture and even changed his name to seem Korean-American.
- Gilligan Cut: As mentioned below in Tempting Fate, the team tries to dramatically overprice their chicken to stop customers from coming. Inspector Go looks proudly at the new sign... then, cut to him looking dismayed as the restaurant is still as full and busy as ever, this time with Japanese tourists specifically coming to it as a "go-to" destination.
- Gone Horribly Right: The heroes set up shop in a chicken restaurant but end up running a booming business after Ma's chicken recipe turns out to be super delicious.
- Insurance Fraud: At the end of the opening pile up, one lone compact comes inching in and softly makes contact. The driver later confesses that they had a dented bumper and hoped to use the pile-up as an excuse to get the insurance company to pay for repairs.
- Intoxication Ensues: After stupidly conducting Fingertip Drug Analysis on a lot of baggies, Jae-Hoon ends up high as a kite for the remainder of the movie.
- Irony: The squad ends up at one point more focused on running the chicken restaurant than staking out the gang they're supposed to catch, much to Young-Ho's frustrations. Said restaurant's success leads to said gang approaching them to franchise as a cover for their drug dealing, the string of events this cases leading to the squad being able to bust them and the rival gang.
- Jurisdiction Friction: The narcotics team butts heads with the violent crimes team after the latter makes a major drug bust while taking down a gang. The team is especially irate on Go's behalf because the bust got Choi promoted despite the slot being meant for Go.
- Lethal Chef: When trying to sort out who's going to run the kitchen, Young-Ho quietly reminds Go of a stew Jang once made that stank to high heaven and reminded everyone of fecal matter.
- Limited Advancement Opportunities: Go's career has stalled and his wife is pissed at seeing how everyone else seems to be moving up the ladder. Da Chief mentions that he's sick of seeing Go stuck where he is. In the end, the entire squad gets promoted in a special ceremony after taking down two gangs in the same bust.
- Mood Whiplash: Nearly everything in the film is played for laughs. But when drug users are depicted on screen, the debilitating effects of their addiction are shown seriously.
- Skewed Priorities: The team gets so caught up in operating their chicken restaurant that they forget they're cops running a sting. This frustrates Young-ho because he's the only one actually doing any investigating.
- Sure, Let's Go with That: After the team mixes up cover stories, the proprietor of the chicken restaurant they're trying to buy assumes Go, Jang, and Ma are in a polyamorous relationship. They decide to just run with it to end the transaction as quickly as possible.
- Tempting Fate: In an attempt to stop the flow of customers and actually do their jobs as undercover detectives, the group decides to bump up the price of their chicken to 36,000 won a plate, approximately 36 USD. They all comment on how no one in their right mind would pay this much for sticky fried chicken, common people's food. Not only does this fail to stem the rising popularity of the restaurant, it actually makes them even more famous, especially to Japanese tourists who now consider it a must-dine-at location.
