‘Hard Days’: Cop thriller remake proves bigger isn't always better

It’s generally a given that when a successful Asian film gets the Hollywood treatment, the end result will be bigger and brasher while somehow lacking the spark of the original. Even Martin Scorsese’s Oscar-winning “The Departed” was in most respects inferior to “Infernal Affairs,” the Hong Kong crime drama on which it was based.

There’s something similar going on with Michihito Fujii’s “Hard Days,” a blustery remake of the 2014 South Korean thriller, “A Hard Day.” Kim Seong-hun’s film was a grimly inventive B-movie that punched well above its weight: Screened in the Director’s Fortnight section of the Cannes Film Festival, it became a word-of-mouth hit at home and has already spawned Chinese, Filipino and French adaptations.

This Japanese version is actually one of the better iterations, but that’s partly because France’s Regis Blondeau set the bar so low with last year’s “Restless.” Working with screenwriter Kenya Hirata and producer Masaki Koide (who were also responsible for the 2017 Japanese remake of South Korean drama “Memoirs of a Murderer”), Fujii takes a relatively lean narrative and bulks it up considerably, though the added weight is more flab than muscle.

A few days before New Year’s Day, detective Yuji Kudo (Junichi Okada) is having the worst night of his life. While speeding to his mother’s deathbed, he learns by phone that he has been implicated in a bribery scandal. Then, his estranged wife (Ryoko Hirosue) calls to tell him that his mom has already passed away.

Just when it seems things couldn’t get any lousier, he plows into a young man who has stumbled into the road, killing him instantly. As his phone keeps ringing and a police patrol car looms into view, Yuji makes the impulsive decision to stow the corpse in his trunk. But after finding a creative way to dispose of the evidence, he starts receiving anonymous messages from someone threatening to expose his crime — and asking for the body back.

It isn’t much of a spoiler to reveal that his antagonist is a fellow cop, Takayuki Yazaki (Go Ayano), an investigator who dresses like an SS officer and affects an icy demeanor that’s betrayed only by a persistent facial twitch. The two men become locked in an increasingly messy struggle involving a stash of dirty money and a sinister yakuza boss (Akira Emoto) who seems to be playing both sides at once.

Hirata’s screenplay, co-written with Fujii, is considerably more convoluted than the 2014 original, adding extra characters, flashbacks and layers of intrigue while requiring an even greater suspension of disbelief. There’s very little downtime during the film’s 118 minutes, as if it’s trying not to give viewers an opportunity to notice the gaps in its logic.

Okada overacts wildly — as often happens when A-listers try to play pathetic characters — but Ayano has evident fun as his psychotic adversary. The escalating absurdity of their mutual hostilities would be more entertaining if the film had a better sense of humor, but comedy isn’t really Fujii’s forte.

More than anything else, what’s missing is a sense of dramatic necessity. Too often, Yuji seems to be acting the way he does not because it makes sense within the world the film has created but because that’s what the character in the original movie did. Ultimately, “Hard Days” is just hard to swallow.