At The Movies: Time To Hunt, Upgrade and Good Time are crime capers gone wrong

SINGAPORE - A heist goes as planned - the loot is grabbed, the getaway is smooth, the crooks high-five while visions of a brighter future dance in their heads.

But what kind of thriller lets the bad guys live happily ever after?

The Korean work Time To Hunt (2020, NC16, 134 minutes, Netflix, 2.5 stars) dresses up a basic plot with science-fiction elements. In a future Korea ruined by pollution and economic collapse, a trio of likeable young men are drawn to the idea that a heist might be their only ticket out of hell.

Jun-seok (Lee Je-hoon) is an ex-convict with big dreams and a spiritual big brother to the impressionable Ki-hoon (Choi Woo-shik) and the not-so-bright Jang-ho (Ahn Jae-hong).

They target a mob casino. When things begin to unravel, they discover too late that they had underestimated their prey's capacity for revenge.

Writer-director Yoon Sung-hyun is keen to fuse ideas from old Westerns with newer concepts from current Mexican cartel movies.

There is the notion of the supernaturally adept assassin taken from No Country For Old Men (2007 - with the killer Anton Chigurh, played by Javier Bardem. From the Mexican cartel thriller Sicario (2015), Yoon borrows the idea of a country fully permeated by gang violence.

He, however, takes care to craft family backstories and in his world, guns and bullets follow the laws of physics. Men, after taking a bullet, do not grimace and carry on fighting for another 30 minutes. The attention paid to character development and ballistics pays off in conveying a sense of realism.

But his future South Korea is not much more than a smoggy place roiling with protests. The setting is an excuse for the writer-director to turn the tidy and prosperous Asian nation into a fantasy land that combines the look of an industrial wasteland with the gunplay found in a Brazilian favela.

The dystopian vibe in Upgrade (2018, NC16, 95 minutes, HBO Go, 4 stars) is used for more than window dressing. Like Time To Hunt, this is a writer-director project that expresses the film-maker's love of action cinema.

Australian film-maker Leigh Whannell spent years writing horror (the first three Saw films, 2004 to 2006). There are a few rough edges to Upgrade - the editing could be more crisp, for example - but this is a story that ripples with adrenalin and clever plotting.

The crime that launches the story happens when Grey (Logan Marshall-Green), a simple mechanic, is ambushed by thugs who kill his wife and leave him a quadriplegic. One bionic enhancement later, he becomes a turbocharged avenger.

In contrast, Good Time (2017, M18, 101 minutes, Netflix, 4 stars) has a plot that is dead simple: After his heist goes wrong, Constantine (Robert Pattinson) must race against time to raise bail for his accomplice, his developmentally-disabled brother Nick. Nick is played by Benny Safdie, who with brother Joshua, form the Safdie brothers directing duo.

This work is an almost pure exercise in motion. In events that unfold in near real time, Pattinson's Constantine has to run, flatter, beg, seduce and punch his way across New York City. It is exhausting to watch, but entirely engrossing.