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[HanCinema's Film Review] "Enemies In-Law"

The plot is typical star-crossed lovers stuff. First, Cheol-soo (played by Hong Jong-hyun) is the son of two supervillains. Well they're not really supervillains but Dal-sik (played by Shin Jung-keun) and Yeong-mi (played by Park Eun-hye) have crime-committing abilities so superpowered they might as well be. Luckily "Enemies In-Law" is a comedy, so I don't need to do anything as ridiculous as criticize this movie for featuring a small army of crime dogs- that is, dogs that commit crimes, not dogs that solve crimes.

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Instead, unevenness is the main problem here. Sometimes the jokes are funny, and sometimes they aren't. Mostly this is just a matter of build-up. Dal-sik and Yeong-mi also have the ability to pull off improbably effective disguises- and the spacing is just wide enough that I keep forgetting that they can do this right in time to be surprised by the next joke. The magic knock-out dust is also well-used.

It's everything else that's the problem. Yeong-hee (played by Jin Se-yeon) is the other half of the star-crossed lovers, and her family is made up of cops. Not supercops, unfortunately. That would have been a lot more fun. They're just normal cops who are rather frustratingly and easily bamboozled. Yeong-hee, for example, is established early on as being a master of fencing, yet the only payoff we get for this is an uninspiring sequence where she practically goes down without a joke- I mean a fight.

When comedies go absurd, they really need to go all-the-way absurd, and "Enemies In-Law" suffers mainly from a lack of proper dedication. A late subplot is actually technically the main plot of the movie- but when all the action to date has been about the rather petty attempts of the families to try and separate Cheol-soo and Yeong-hee, it's really hard to get invested in a tonal shift that expects us to take things seriously. Even if there is a joke hidden in there somewhere.

"Enemies In-Law" is decently funny when it tries to be, but ultimately the movie is just too long to be that amusing, and I couldn't help but be disappointed that the script had to pull a villain out of nowhere rather than keep the focus on the inter-familial conflict, which is really where it belongs. "Enemies In-Law" is the kind of movie that's only as good as its jokes, and these really only work that well as far as the more competent characters go.

Still, this probably isn't a movie that deserves to be judged too harshly. It's a very commercial picture- I don't mean that as an insult necessarily, it's just that there's sequences here that are obviously more for titillation than anything else. Like the entire bikini auction. I don't have anything against hot women in bikinis on general principle, but I kind of feel like we're being shifted in that department when we never even get to see Hong Jong-hyun with his shirt off for that long. I mean come on movie. It's bad enough that the women don't get as many good jokes as the men do- why do they have to be the ones to take off their clothes?

Review by William Schwartz

"Enemies In-Law" is directed by Kim Jin-young and features Jin Se-yeon, Hong Jong-hyun, Shin Jung-keun and Jeon Soo-kyeong.

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