Hard Days Movie Review: Junichi Okada, Go Ayano Starrer Is Remake Of Korean Thriller That Will Leave You Breathless

Item: Hard Days Movie Review: Junichi Okada, Go Ayano Starrer Is Remake Of Korean Thriller That Will Leave You Breathless
Rating: 2.5

Starring Junichi Okada, Go Ayano, Ryoko Hirosue, Hayato Isomura, and Tetta Sugimoto, the film is currently streaming on Netflix. Hard Days has already debuted in Japan, it was released in theatres on May 19, this year. Keep scrolling to read our review.

Subhash K Jha

Updated Dec 9, 2023 , 09:45 AM IST

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Hard Days

Critic's Ratings

2.5

Hard Days Movie Review Junichi Okada Go Ayano Starrer Is Remake Of Korean Thriller That Will Leave You Breathless

About Hard Days

In the first ten minutes, the film’s compromised protagonist, seen driving through torrential rain, hears that his hospitalised mother is dead and that a departmental inquiry for corruption has found him guilty. As if all this is not enough a man stumbles in front of his car and is killed.

Yuji Kudo(Junichi Okada) our hero in a jam, stashes the body in his car’s dickie and heads towards the hospital to pay his mother his last respects, but is intercepted by cops on the road who suspect foul in his trunk and alcohol on his breath.

And we have just begun. The aptly named Hard Days will leave you exhausted. There is an overload of activities and a profusion of stunts on the road and in confined spaces, which render this remake a tad anxious in mood and desperate in intention. This, however, does not deter the screenplay’s attention-grabbing volume.

Once you are in it, there is no way out except the end. The breakneck speed ensures our undivided concentration. However, it is not all believable or even convincing. The corpse in the dickie is especially problematic since it gets waylaid at the screenplay’s convenience sometimes at the cost of commonsense.

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Finally, so much misery is heaped on poor Kudo that after a while Hard Days seems like an extended excuse for misery-porn.

While the plot zigzags all over the place, a large part of the dramatic conflict is between Yuji Kudo and Takayuki Yazaki (Go Ayano), an icy-cold colleague of Yuji in the police force who is ostensibly investigating the corruption charges against Kudo but is actually into a far bigger scam than anything that Kudo could have pulled off.

Compared with the 2014 Korean original, this remake is staggeringly overstacked. I have seldom seen a thriller so addicted to pace. Most of the race against time is well executed. But sometimes you do wonder what Hard Days would have been like if everyone, the writer, director, actors and characters, had just slowed down a bit.

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