Fridae

Like Miss Congeniality, Runway Cop assigns a slovenly, unkempt cop unfamiliar with the concepts of social graces and personal hygiene to go undercover into the world of fashion and beauty to solve a major crime. Here, Kang Ji-hwan puts on 20 kg in his role as Cha Cheol-soo, who despite being the disgrace of the Seoul police department, passes muster as a male runway model solely due to his towering height.

Gender reversal aside, Runway Cop brings back much of what made Miss Congeniality work as a comedy, namely the hilarity that ensues when multiple comic genres run smack into each other like the sub-atomic particles in the Large Hadron Collider. In both films, the genres being collided are: an undercover cop farce, the fish-out-of-water comedy, and a retelling of Pygmalion.

With a far more impressive resume of short films, Sin Tae-ra continues to negotiate his long transition to the feature format. In blending the three comic plots into one film, the script occasionally meanders and trips over itself. Its long middle act, where an extraneous sub-plot (surely an excuse to plant two drop-dead gorgeous real-life runway models into the cast) is introduced, is rescued by a tight, action-dominated third act.

Quite surprisingly, it is the film's Pygmalion story which comes off the weakest, partly due to the lacklustre chemistry between the undercover cop played by Kang and the fashion designer and Seong's Pygmalion. More importantly though, the gender reversal in Runway Cop robs what was the strongest point of Miss Congeniality — its critique of gender and femininity as artifice and performance. Here, this film makes no attempt at deconstructing masculinity. While the first act hints at some sort of critique of the competitive social climbing and extreme go-getter attitudes in modern Korea, the potential theme is not carried through — even though there is a reference to Gangnam aspirations and Gangnam styles.

While being a generally competent comedy, Runway Cop holds no surprises, exceeds no expectations.