Steal My Heart

aka 캐치미 aka Kaechimi aka Catch Me

2013
Written and directed by Lee Hyeon-jong

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.

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.