Steal My Heart (Review)

Steal My Heart

aka 캐치미 aka Kaechimi aka Catch Me
캐치미 Steal My Heart
2013
Written and directed by Lee Hyeon-jong
Kim Ah-Joon 캐치미 Steal My Heart
Let’s jump back down the well of Korean romantic comedies again with Steal My Heart! It’s got super star Kim Ah-joong, it’s got Joo Won, it’s got a director who hasn’t done much before, how can it go wrong? Unfortunately, that’s what we need to find out, because it doesn’t go right. Instead of a great film, we just get a film that squanders all opportunities to better itself. If there is anything I hate most of all, it’s a film that wastes potential.

Police profiler Lee Ho-tae (Joo Won) was having a good day, having just figured out the routine of a serial killer plaguing the area and leading a stakeout to catch him. One hiccup is the suspected kill is ran over (twice!) by a hit and run driver, which turns into a joke hanging over Lee Ho-tae’s head to the point where people are saying the car solved the case and not him (why no one seems too happy that a guy who murders people is off the streets nor that Lee Ho-tae did all the work finding him is never explained). Lee Ho-tae tracks down the car and driver to save his career, the only hitch being the driver is Yoon Jin-sook (Kim Ah-Joong), who he knew ten years ago as Lee Sook-ja when he was dating her.
캐치미 Steal My Heart
Through a series of misadventures and attempts to protect Yoon Jin-sook (and that she’s sick with a cold, probably the only time in movie history a character will cough and not be dead by the end of the film!), she ends up staying at Lee Ho-tae’s place, while he finds out more and more about how she’s a master criminal thief. They attempt to make amends by returning some of the art she’s stolen, all while staying one step ahead from the rival Detective Oh (Baek Do-Bin), who keeps getting assigned the cases that Yoon Jin-sook committed. But Yoon Jin-sook knows she has to answer at some point for the things she’s done.

A cop vs. criminal romantic comedy is one of those obvious opposites attract scenarios that you’d think this would be a hit out of the park. Especially with Korea producing a few good heist flicks recently. But instead, things are so by the numbers that Steal My Heart never rises above the material to say much of anything. Yoon Jin-sook is far to sympathetic as a criminal, and far too eager to go to jail for her crimes when caught. Lee Ho-tae is powerless before the woman he used to love before fate intervened and he thought he lost her, and now finds out he barely knew her at all.
Kim Ah-joong 캐치미 Steal My Heart
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