Ten minutes into the film, I thought I knew where it was ultimately going. Twenty minutes later, my projection was proven erroneous as I was forcefully reminded that this wasn't a Hollywood picture. Had it been so, the premise of an ex-cop-turned-pimp trying to find the latest one of his girls to have disappeared at the hands of a psychopathic client would have kept both antagonistic characters apart until the film's climactic ending. In The Chaser, Joong-ho Eom (Yun-seok Kim) catches up to the degenerate Young-min Jee (Jung-woo Ha) rather quickly. Therefore, while there are two flat-out chases that occur on foot between them (one uphill and one down; which is interesting in itself), the bulk of the movie focuses on the irony that exists in regards to the incapability of prosecuting Young-min due to a seeming lack of evidence (such as the absence of bodies and the police's inability to find the suspect's residence; never mind that he repeatedly confesses to multiple homicides and aggressively attacks one of his interrogators). With that in mind, the film essentially follows Joong-ho's rising frustration (and decreasing selfishness as his quest transforms itself from a business asset retrieval into a redemptive mission of vengeance) at being continuously stonewalled regarding Young-min's prosecution. The latter's repeated beatings at the hand of the former puts the pimp (who is shown to be a better detective with his lonesome sidekick Meathead than the entire police department and all of its available resources). Through its critical mockery of the Korean judicial system and its inner operators, the title is consistently made ironic by the fact that the titular chaser keeps chasing a target that he's already caught, making this one of the most original rendition of the cop/serial killer genre that I've seen in quite some time.
