The comedy film "Extreme Occupation", which was released in South Korea at the beginning of this year, was not taken seriously by the industry at first, but it was not expected that less than two months after its release, the film would be nearly 137 billion won in total box office revenue, and the historical masterpiece "The Battle of Mingliang" was picked off, becoming the highest-grossing work in the history of Korean cinema. In terms of return on investment, the film has gained 14 times the cost of only 9.5 billion won, even in the camp of comedies that are good at small fights.
Stills from Extreme Career. Image from the web
It is worth mentioning that the original script of "Extreme Occupation", a small-cost counterattack, stood out from the "Sino-Korean Story Joint Development Project" in 2015; the project is also known to the audience as "one book and two beats" - the Chinese and Korean production teams have localized adaptations and shooting on the basis of the common script setting and structure. The domestic counterpart to "Extreme Occupation" is "Lobster Police", but after the latter was released last summer, word of mouth and box office performance were average.
Stills from "Lobster Cop". Image from the web
In fact, the co-production script is excellent, but it is just like the same specification of the rough house, and it is the "decoration" difference of the localization adaptation that has become the winning magic weapon of "Extreme Occupation".
Extreme Occupation tells the story of a police squad who pretends to be a fried chicken shop owner and sells fried chicken with employees in order to catch drug dealers. Its basic setting is mixed with common elements of comedies such as "small people turning over salted fish" and "group fighting monsters"; it is also supplemented by action, flying cars and other technical scenes that have been used to attract audiences with certain visual requirements. But the old stem blossoms new flowers, relying on the ubiquitous dislocation and contrast in the movie.
To some extent, comedy is the structural reorganization of reasonable things and the expression of them in a subversive way to achieve unexpected results. In the process of subversion, the audience's perception of the story situation is both familiar and unfamiliar, so the sense of dislocation and contrast is the most important source of laughter and tension, and the higher the degree of dislocation and contrast, the stronger the dramatic effect.
In contrast to "Extreme Occupation", the majestic and arrogant policeman becomes a businessman who accompanies customers with smiling faces, one second before he is still holding a gun and the next second he smears bread crumbs on chicken legs, with the mood of seeing death to send fried chicken to drug dealers but pounced on an empty, originally wanted to monitor drug dealers but mistakenly hit the fried chicken shop into an Internet celebrity shop... The unexpected and reasonable plot has made people bright, and the interlocking plot development is even more hilarious. Not only that, each bridge section basically maintains a rhythm of 10-15 minutes, and in the case of ensuring the intensity of laughter and the amount of plot information as much as possible, it can continue to keep the audience fresh, and the screenwriter's "decoration" skills of combing clues and filling the bridge section can be seen.
If creating an atmosphere of dislocation and contrast is the advantage of "Extreme Occupation" in terms of narrative, then another brilliant point, the lines, is another key factor in the success of the film's visualization. Text and sound are important forms of expanding the film image space, as far as comedy movies are concerned, lines can especially render the story situation, express the character of the character, and play a unique aesthetic function in creating laughter and explaining the core of the film. Many of the clumsy comedy movie lines lie in their tangible and unfocused points, while the lines of "Extreme Occupation" balance fun and depth, and are precise.
On the one hand, "Extreme Occupation" successfully portrays a group of policemen with different backgrounds but are depressed in the system through lines, and then shakes out the baggage that matches their identity by the mouth of the character, so that the character image and the text sound complement each other. The captain played by Yoo Seung-yong is entangled in peer comparison and family relations, and the lines he says about "promotion" and "the way of getting along with husband and wife" from his mouth can resonate with the audience while being reasonable; in the same way, the female police officer who is a Muay Thai champion and the police officer from the baseball team show more of the young and hot-blooded side in the lines, and at the same time express their views on the life and social relationship between young people in South Korea's "whole generation" through the mouth of the two.
On the other hand, the lines of "Extreme Occupation" effectively implement the comedic spirit of "funny", "flavorful" and "prickly", and the quality of the baggage is not vulgar, and it has a sense of high-end that is rarely seen in comedy. For example, at the beginning of the film, through the discussion of the professional ethics of the police team, it is like a small talk show, which not only contains the willingness of hard work, the acceptance and struggle of the reality of career development, but also triggers the audience to think deeply about the social environment, and adds valuable criticism behind the fun of laughter and the humor of the times. This kind of line processing method is superior to that of many comedy movies in China that still rely on "map cannons" and "gender differences" to shake low-level baggage.
Although "Extreme Occupation" is still flawed in the logical connection of some bridges, it respects the law of genre films and respects the aesthetic taste of the audience, which is nothing more than an excellent industrial comedy work on the whole. Although it is lucky to become a box office champion, the professionalism and attentive attitude it embodies in localization production are still worth learning from domestic comedy films.
□ Shen Zhiying (Film Critic)
Beijing News Editor Wu Longzhen Proofreader Lu Aiying