General · EdgepediaOctober 3, 20265 min read

The Unjust (부당거래)

The Unjust (부당거래) is a 2010 South Korean crime thriller directed by Ryoo Seung-wan, in which a police captain, a corrupt prosecutor, and a gangster-turned-businessman fabricate a culprit for a serial murder case that the police failed to solve. It stars Hwang Jung-min, Ryoo Seung-bum, and Yoo Hai-jin, was written by Park Hoon-jung, and ran 119 minutes with a rating restricting it to audiences 19 and older.¹^•²

Key fact	Detail
Release	October 28, 2010 (South Korea); CJ ENM's English page lists October 27, 2010¹^•²
Director / writer	Ryoo Seung-wan / Park Hoon-jung¹
Lead cast	Hwang Jung-min as police captain Choi Cheol-gi, Ryoo Seung-bum as prosecutor Joo Yang, Yoo Hai-jin as gangster-turned-builder Jang Seok-gu¹
Box office	2,722,996 admissions and 20,996,302,500 won in South Korea, the 8th highest-grossing Korean film of 2010³
Awards	Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Screenplay at the 32nd Blue Dragon Awards; invited to the 61st Berlin International Film Festival in Competition²
Rating and runtime	119 minutes; restricted to audiences 19 and over (청소년관람불가)¹
Production	Film Train with Oui Yu Nae Kang (외유내강), distributed by CJ Entertainment; 86 days of location filming across South Korea¹

Spoilers

Plot

The film opens with a serial murder case that has unsettled the whole country: the killer targets young schoolgirls, and the president himself visits the police agency to demand a swift arrest.⁴ Before the special investigation unit is even formed, the most likely suspect is shot dead by police, leaving the case at a dead end.⁵ Under pressure from above, the police leadership orders a fabricated culprit, and the job falls to Choi Cheol-gi (Hwang Jung-min), a capable metropolitan investigation captain who has repeatedly missed promotion because he lacks connections.⁴

The deal. Choi secretly recruits Jang Seok-gu (Yoo Hai-jin), a gangster-turned-construction businessman who has been supplying him with off-the-books funds, and has him bring in an "actor" to play the murderer.⁵ The staged arrest succeeds, but prosecutor Joo Yang (Ryoo Seung-bum), who is well practiced in the improper deals his own sponsors hand him, senses something wrong while interrogating the suspect and forces his way into the game.⁴ A review in the Maeil newspaper described the three leads as men at the edge of power, a police officer obsessed with promotion, a prosecutor who trades on his sponsors, and a builder rising through crime, figures drawn from stories that appear in the daily news.⁶

Production

The film was produced by Film Train and co-produced by Oui Yu Nae Kang, the company run by Ryoo Seung-wan's collaborator Kang Hye-jung, with CJ Entertainment providing and distributing.¹^•⁷ To add realism, the production spent 86 days on location across the country; the rooftop deal scenes were shot on the roofs of two buildings in Seoul and Daejeon, and a rooftop cafe was built in the plaza of the Daejeon Arts Center for the staged public event, with extras of all ages recruited for the scene.¹ Filming also took place in Busan in May 2010, at locations including Novotel, the Busan Environment Corporation's Suyeong and Haeundae facilities, Centum City, and Shinsegae Department Store.⁸

Several fellow filmmakers appeared in comic cameos: director Lee Joon-ik, Hwang Byeong-guk as a court-appointed lawyer, Lee Choon-yun of Cine 2000 as the police agency chief, and director Lee Kyoung-mi as a forensic examiner.⁹

Box office

A career turning point. The film opened in what distributors called the off-season, yet it topped the Korean box office for two consecutive weeks and passed 2.5 million admissions in 32 days.¹⁰^•¹¹ For Ryoo Seung-wan, whose previous best was the 2.4 million admissions of Arahan (2004), the result placed him among Korea's commercially reliable directors; a distributor official called weekday audiences of 80,000 in the slow season unusual.¹² By the end of the year the Korean Film Council's tally recorded 2,722,996 admissions and 20,996,302,500 won in revenue, ranking 8th among Korean films released in 2010.³

Reception and awards

At the 32nd Blue Dragon Film Awards in November 2011, Park Hoon-jung won Best Screenplay, and the film also took Best Picture and Best Director.¹³^•² It was nominated for Best Film and Best Director at the Grand Bell Awards and the Baek Sang Art Awards, and Ryoo Seung-beom won Best Actor at the 2011 Buil Film Awards for his role as the prosecutor.¹⁴ The film was invited to the 61st Berlin International Film Festival in the In Competition section.² On the review aggregator Rotten Tomatoes it holds a 60% Tomatometer from three reviews; critics noted its kinetic energy and film-noir take on institutional corruption, while some found the plot overly convoluted.¹⁵

Legacy

In 2020 the magazine Cine 21 placed The Unjust in its list of the ten Korean films of the 2010s, citing its influence on Korean commercial cinema in that decade.¹⁶ The Korean Film Archive's cinematheque program also selected it among the Korean films of 2010 that critics and programmers singled out.¹⁷ The film marked a shift in Ryoo Seung-wan's career away from the action films that had defined him, drawing praise that "Ryoo Seung-wan has changed," and it began a run of collaborations between the director and Hwang Jung-min that later included The Battleship Island (2017).⁵^•¹⁸ Producer Han Jae-deok, who ran the production, went on to found Sanai Pictures in 2012.¹⁹

References

Topic: Encyclopedia › Arts and culture › Screen and stage › Film and television › Films and standalone screen works › Individual films by title and year › Crime, thriller, and mystery films (individual works) › 2010–2014 films › Titles M to W

Initially written Oct 3, 2026 · Reviewed: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 25, 2026 · Edited: Oct 3, 2026; Oct 15, 2026; Oct 25, 2026; Nov 1, 2026 · Last review: Oct 25, 2026

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