I read somewhere that basketball is a sucker’s bet. Which is to say no matter how well you know the game, the margins never make betting worthwhile. The fact that gangsters are involved? Fuggetaboutit. Soriously. Forget. About. It.
Tell that to the Laverne & Shirley of modern Korean escorts. Mi-sun (Han So-hee) and Do-kyung (Jeon Jong-seo) dream of owning a flower shop. Actually, only one of them really has this dream, but it doesn’t matter as all their capital is tied up in a scam. These two may or may not be escort girls on the side; what we know for sure is that every person they know with money is a criminal. So nobody can be too surprised when all the escorts in their party get scammed in a housing development hustle. Well, I say “nobody can be surprised,” but these two are in a movie, so some how they are anyway.
Trying to get it back, they bet on basketball, knowing that the star player for a given team is compromised. They are able to contact the player and put the heat on to get exactly the outcome they want, which, by the way, is impossible, but that’s a different movie. In Project Y, these two win the bet only to have their broker cheat them as well. Boy, you just can’t trust criminals these days.
This is the point at which, being human, you cut your losses, sigh, and start over, knowing life has beaten you for the time being. Mi-sun and Do-kying {read: “Dobby”}, however, continue to be in a movie. So when Mi-sun overhears about a relatively unguarded $700k, well, sure,
why not? And it turns out that it’s not just $700k; it’s $700k AND millions of dollars in gold bricks. Well, they were planning on stealing from the mob anyway; how is this any different?
Project Y -being a movie as already established- means the biggest baddest LeRoy Brown in all of Seoul immediately knows the money and gold bars have been stolen, likely who has stolen them, and where to get his property and his vengeance in at the same time. Project Y was a decent action thriller. I had trouble telling the players apart, but we certainly had no trouble knowing what was going on in any given scene. The motives seemed very movie-like and the title seems flat wrong. If this is a chromosome thing, shouldn’t it have been titled “Project X,” and if it isn’t to what does Project Y refer? Not a huge recommendation here, but for those who enjoy films where random women prove themselves able to play with the big boys, this is probably a must-see.
Two woman with a soft-mob connection
Find their lives headed in the wrong direction
But they soon find a way
To win back the day
All they need is luck and God-like protection
Not Rated, 110 Minutes
Director: Hwan Lee
Writer: Lee Hwan, Kwak Jae-min, Oh Yu-kyung
Genre: Korean mobsters
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: Korean feminist mobsters
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Misogynists
