YADANG: THE SNITCH - Mark Reviews Movies

Yadang: The Snitch, Well Go USA

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Review by Mark Dujsik | April 24, 2025

The early promise of Yadang: The Snitch is in the character of the title and the nebulous gray zone between crime and the law that he represents. His role isn't necessarily unique to those who have watched any crime drama at the movies or on TV in the past few decades or more, since Lee Kang-soo (Kang Ha-neul) is essentially a criminal informant. What is slightly different about his job is that it actually is a good career for him, since he works mostly autonomously as a sort of independent contractor who offers benefits to both sides of the criminal-police dichotomy.

To the cops, he offers low-end drug buyers or sellers, who can lead the police to the bigger fish of the international drug trade. Those high-profile arrests make the cops, who have to look as if they're stopping the flood of illicit drugs into South Korea in order to keep their own jobs, look good—not to mention the various local prosecutors, who are all vying for promotions before their mandated decade of service comes to an end, and politicians, who have been pushing a war on drugs as a reason to keep getting elected.

To the criminals, Kang-soo serves as a negotiator, giving them a chance to get a reduced or suspended sentence if the information they offer the police is worth something. He's also an example of what this kind of snitching can get someone: a snappy suit, some fine sunglasses, and an expensive car. He's living a dream lifestyle of sorts, especially since he was just a rideshare driver three years ago and spent some time in prison after being framed by one of his passengers for the drugs the guy had for himself.

That last part gets at the point screenwriters Kim Hyo-seok, Hwang Byeong-gug (who also directed), and Yoon Soon-yong try to make with this convoluted thriller. There's an inherent corruption in this system, because casual drug users and addicts alike are seen as merely pawns in some political game being played far above and out of the control of most of them. At one point, some characters talk about the absence of any rehabilitation facilities in South Korea, and in the insulated world of this story, that has too much terrible logic to it. A rehabilitated addict offers nothing to this system, because they're not buying from the dealers and, as a result, they don't have any information to pass along to the cops.

The movie hints at that kind of nuance in its narrative and its dissection of this system's hypocritical approach to fighting the influx of drugs into and the use of drugs within the country. In practice, however, the script almost seems unwilling to address that subtly sinister scheme in any meaningful way.

Instead, it gives us big, bold villains, such as Kang-soo's handler Ku Gwan-hee (Yoo Hai-jin), the district prosecutor who realizes Kang-soo's conviction was unjust but decides to use him and his inherent charms for the snitching business. After a few years of working together, Kang-soo has made himself a lot of money, and Gwan-hee eventually rises to those cushy jobs he has wanted since becoming a prosecutor.

The turning point comes when Kang-soo arranges a sting operation that catches Cho Hoon (Ryu Kyung-soo) with a lot of illegal drugs. The young man, though, is the son of a wealthy businessman who is a candidate in the forthcoming presidential election, and when one of the candidate's own negotiators offers Gwan-hee even more power for letting Hoon go, the prosecutor takes the deal, interferes with a local bust, and cuts ties with Kang-soo, one of the only people who knows the truth about the candidate's son, and leaves him to the violent retaliation of some drug dealers.

Also caught up in this web are local police detective Oh Sang-jae (Park Hae-joon), who had been following Hoon for some time and was ready to arrest him, and actress Uhm Su-jin (Chae Won-been), who's labeled a drug addict after participating in Sang-jae's sting on behalf of the cops. The whole thing becomes quite convoluted at this point, as the three wronged characters try to put their differences aside and figure out a way to bring Gwan-hee's corruption, Hoon's criminal activity, and the presidential candidate's illegal influence to light.

The problem, beyond the focus on plotting over these characters and overly complicated nature of that plot, is that the filmmakers undermine the point they've almost been making up until this scheme. The whole system is wrong here, but in making the villains the most blatantly corrupt examples of how that system can be abused, it basically lets the intrinsic problems with it off the hook. It's as if the screenwriters don't want to offend or openly question this kind of policy and these sorts of tactics. While the trio's scheme does lead to some clever bits of planning on their end and staging on Hwang's part (One revelation comes by way of a jaw-dropping zoom shot), Yadang: The Snitch lets its elaborate narrative overshadow whatever message it wants us to take from that story.

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