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.