Given the gritty realism of Korean cinema (think Memories of Murder or The Chaser ), it is a natural instinct to ask if this shocking narrative was ripped from the headlines. The short answer is
Yoo Young-chul attempted to murder Kim Tae-chon using a crowbar near a karaoke bar. Unfortunately for Yoo, he had picked the wrong target. Kim was not a random civilian; he was a trained fighter and a brutal criminal enforcer. Despite being bludgeoned, Kim fought back. He overpowered the serial killer, disarmed him, and proceeded to beat Yoo unconscious. is the gangster the cop the devil based on true story
The core, unbelievable premise— A serial killer accidentally attacks a mob boss, and the mob boss hunts him down —is 100% factual. The screenwriters took that extraordinary seed of reality and grew a fictional forest around it. Sadly, the real-life gangster, Kim Tae-chon, did not have a heroic arc. He was a violent criminal who, despite inadvertently helping the police by identifying a serial killer, remained a career gangster. He passed away in 2016. Given the gritty realism of Korean cinema (think
However, the specific connection to The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil lies in how he was almost caught. In August 2004, during his trial, Yoo Young-chul revealed a detail that shocked prosecutors. He explained that in the early stages of his spree, he had attacked a man in a Gangnam nightlife district. That man did not die. In fact, the victim tracked Yoo down, beat him savagely, and threatened to kill him if he ever saw him again. Kim was not a random civilian; he was
The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil succeeds because it uses the skeleton of a true crime story to build a muscular action epic. The film asks us to imagine a world where a gangster is the lesser of two evils, and a cop must become a devil to catch a devil. While that specific scenario never happened in a Korean police station, the fact that it almost did—the fact that a real mob boss beat a real serial killer to a pulp—is exactly why the movie feels so terrifyingly plausible.
The film is visceral, brutal, and strangely elegant in its violence. It tells the story of three men: Jang Dong-su (Don Lee), a mob boss who gets stabbed by a serial killer and survives; Jung Tae-seok (Kim Moo-yul), a hot-headed detective obsessed with catching the killer; and "K" (Kim Sung-kyu), the ghost-like murderer who connects them. The plot hinges on an unbelievable truce—a gangster and a cop shaking hands to hunt a monster.
However, one detail the film borrows accurately is the . In the movie, the gangster (Don Lee) deliberately rams his car into the killer's vehicle to disable him. In reality, Yoo Young-chul was caught because he rammed his car into a police surveillance vehicle by accident, leading to his arrest. The filmmakers inverted this—giving the gangster the agency to crash the car. Fact vs. Fiction: The Definitive Split To help clarify, here is a direct comparison between the film’s plot and the historical reality: