Veteran

The criminally handsome Yoo Ah-in plays the handsomely criminal chaebol heir Jo Tae-oh in Veteran, the sixth (soon-to-be seventh) highest-grossing Korean film of all time. A menacing Cane Corso stands by his side as he extorts, assaults, commits battery, rape, and more. Korean director Ryoo Seung-wan, nicknamed the “Action Kid,” treats the dog like Chekhov’s gun. That Tae-oh will command the dog to rip open the calf of a police officer or someone else who “wronged” him is an inevitability as far as foreshadowing goes. At one point, the business-crime boss even jokingly tells the dog to bite an underling worker. Then, like a flame on gas, Jo beats the dog to death with a golf club.

Maybe I was primed to view the dog as a threat rather than a victim. Earlier today, I started the post-exposure rabies treatment for dog bites on my hip and the very hand I type with now. My attack aside, Ryoo, borrowing from the masters of deception in his spy films, sleights viewers with the dog. We were intended to see it as a potential threat, a weapon for Jo to use to abuse others.

That’s not how the Action Kid sees the world. To him, power and benevolence are binaries that flow in opposite directions. The greater power one holds, the wider the void of benevolence. When lowly detective Seo Do-cheol (Hwang Jung-min), the film’s protagonist and seemingly the only person in Korea with a penchant for justice, tells a journalist friend about the abuse and attempted murder of a cheated truck driver, Bae (Jung Woong-in), at the behest of Tae-oh’s conglomerate, he learns an editor shut down the story. The same thing happens to every other reporter on the beat: those with power wield it for their own gain. And for Ryoo, a director with a notoriously difficult upbringing on the outskirts of society, this exploitation is an inevitable and permanent feature of the society we inhabit. 

As fierce as the Cane Corso may look, to Tae-oh it was a creaturely servant whose worth was tied to its ability to intimidate. With no will, a leash around its neck, and responsive to the commands of an owner, it was all but a slave: a victim like Bae, cheated and beaten of freedom and a better life.