The Thieves

Watch for

• Track who knows the full plan at any given moment. Choi keeps redistributing information so that a character who looks secondary in one sequence can suddenly become the person controlling the next move.
• Watch Gianna Jun’s Yenicall use physical confidence as comedy and strategy. Her movement on ropes, through rooms and around other thieves often communicates her priorities faster than dialogue does.
• The film treats Hong Kong and Macau as active heist environments rather than postcard backgrounds. Elevation, windows, casino corridors and dense streets continually reshape what a theft can look like.
• Romantic history and criminal history overlap throughout the crew. Pepsee and Macao Park’s past is not separate from the caper mechanics; distrust created years earlier directly changes present tactical decisions.

Production notes

KOFIC lists The Thieves at 135 minutes and credits Choi Dong-hoon as director. Its In Focus retrospective emphasizes the exceptionally star-heavy cast and describes the film as a jazzy crime crowd-pleaser that drew almost 13 million viewers. KOFIC’s production reporting notes that the shoot stretched across Macau, Hong Kong, Busan and Seoul over roughly six months, giving the international setting material weight rather than relying on generic establishing shots. The film also brings Hong Kong performers such as Simon Yam and Derek Tsang into an ensemble led by major Korean stars including Kim Yun-seok, Kim Hye-soo, Lee Jung-jae and Gianna Jun. Choi had already built his career on caper structures in The Big Swindle and Tazza, so the 2012 film feels less like an imitation of Hollywood heist cinema than an expansion of his own fast-talking, deception-heavy style onto a larger canvas. KOFIC records 12,983,675 cumulative admissions, confirming how thoroughly that formula connected with domestic audiences.

Trivia

• KOFIC records 12,983,675 cumulative admissions, making The Thieves one of the landmark Korean box-office successes of the early 2010s.
• KOFIC reported that the production filmed for six months across Macau, Hong Kong, Busan and Seoul, matching the movie’s unusually international ensemble and geography.
• The film reunited Choi Dong-hoon with performers from earlier work and helped establish a repertory-company feeling that continued into Assassination, which also features several of the same major stars.
• Gianna Jun’s Yenicall became one of the film’s most memorable characters because the role combines stunt-oriented physicality, vanity, humor and ruthless opportunism instead of restricting her to a conventional romantic function.
• KOFIC reported that The Thieves crossed ten million admissions only twenty-two days after release, demonstrating how quickly the ensemble caper became a national crowd event.

Legacy

The Thieves matters to Korean Movie Night because it represents a kind of mainstream Korean filmmaking that international “best of” lists can undersell: big-star entertainment executed with enough formal personality to remain recognizable years later. Its legacy is visible in Choi Dong-hoon’s continued status as one of the country’s premier commercial directors and in the careers of an ensemble that now reads like an extraordinary concentration of Korean and Hong Kong screen talent. The film also captures a moment when Korean blockbusters were confidently regional rather than merely domestic, using multilingual casts and Asian city locations as part of the story’s normal world. Rewatchability comes from distribution of attention. A first viewing follows the plan and betrayals; later viewings can focus on Pepsee’s calculations, Yenicall’s opportunism, the older thieves’ melancholy or the way Macao Park manipulates everyone’s assumptions. It is sleek without becoming anonymous, funny without dissolving the stakes, and sufficiently complicated to keep a group engaged without requiring anyone to study beforehand. That is exactly the kind of film this collection is supposed to rescue from being overshadowed by prestige canon alone.