Seo-joon (played by Byun Yo-han) is a former cop turned construction worker. A tough day on the job becomes a lot worse when Seo-joon, and all of his fellow crew, realize that in the confusion of a seeming accident all their families had been successfully targeted by a voice phishing scam. “On the Line” is a bit overdramatic in this depiction. Actual voice phishing scams focus on quantity over quality, and are increasingly poorly constructed to better weed out potentially skeptical marks in the earlier steps.
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But hey, this is an action movie we’re talking about, and better organized criminals make for better villains. The first half hour of “On the Line” is quite well-paced in terms of making this point. The construction site sets up the conflict. Seo-joon promptly utilizes his police background to identify the suspicious man he saw there. With more help, he traces the source of the call center to China. Then, he tries to infiltrate it as an employee- because native Korean speakers are needed for the scams to work, the titular voice.
Well, that’s not really the case with “On the Line” as the film’s English title. It’s a bit of a shame, since “Voice” works a lot better, but is already being used by the multi-seasonal television drama about an emergency call center. “On the Line” is unfortunately not an easier title to search for just because it features three generic words. Any time I looked for information on it in English I got a lot of references to the completely unrelated movie “One Line” from several years back.
Where was I? Ah yes, Seo-joon infiltrates the call center and…the pacing kind of breaks down. The main issue is that there just isn’t very much for Seo-joon to do in there. The backdrop of the giant smoke-filled warehouse where the work takes place is quite distinctive. The jump suits are likewise creepy- unintentionally and anachronistically evocative of the similar designs in “Squid Game” except that these lowlifes know they’re destroying lives. They just rationalize it as a way to make a living.
But we don’t really get much exposure of Seo-joon’s fellow voices, who are all unnamed. The focus instead moves to the villains, none of whom are particularly competent or interesting. “On the Line” is actually wrecked a bit by its simple concept, mostly because there’s no way to stretch it out. “On the Line” would have worked a lot better with a ninety minute runtime- there’s easily twenty minutes of redundant material that could have been easily cut.
“On the Line” isn’t really a bad movie, just kind of generic despite its strong premise. If nothing else, just by taking the subject matter seriously the production manages to improve on “Part-Time Spy” with its very similar plot, although the concept was completely different. Here, “On the Line” mostly just functions as a Byun Yo-han vehicle. While Byun Yo-han is a perfectly decent action star, this script really needed a few more rewrites.
Review by William Schwartz
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“On the Line” is directed by Kim Gok, Kim Sun, and features Byun Yo-han, Kim Mu-yeol, Kim Hee-won, Park Myung-hoon, Lee Ju-young, Jo Jae-yun. Release date in Korea: 2021/09/15.
[HanCinema’s Film Review] “On the Line” (2021/11/19)
Source: Laban Lang Philippines
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