By Quantum Physics: A Nightlife Venture (2019)

Synopsis

Your first challenge is to decide if Lee Chan-woo (Park Hae-soo) is just a glib bullshitter or he really believes this philosophy he’s spouting about quantum physics. Stuff like: If something pops into reality only when you observe it, then you can change reality just by imagining what you want. He’s feeding this line to Sung Eun-young (Seo Yea-ji), who he’s trying to recruit as a manager for the high-end dance club he’s opening. She’s not impressed, but takes the job anyway. Opening night … an electric success. He puts it down to … quantum physics.

We’re used to nightclub owners being guys who skirt the boundaries of ethical behavior, so we’re dubious about who is really is. But it actually seems Lee’s fair and protective with his employees. One gotcha: he’s got some debts to pay to investigative reporter Park Ki-hun (Kim Sang-ho) and gangster Jung Kap-taek (Kim Eung-soo). It’s his commitment to paying back Park and Jung for favors that compels to agree to something he knows is A Bad Idea. It involves using one of his nightclub clients, a famous rapper, to lure the son of Baek Young-kam (Byun Hee-bong), an awesomely powerful gangster and awesomely corrupt politician, into a drug bust that will enable Park and Jung to pay him back for past grievances.

Best to stop there. You know the frame-up will go sideways. And that’s followed by an non-stop onslaught of bad guys of all kinds trying to cover their tracks. As the double crosses, and the double-double crosses, pile up, a rogue’s gallery of aggrieved prosecutors, newspaper editors, police, and gangster’s flunkies all engage in a musical chairs of sell outs, alliance switches, and alliance re-switches.

Lee and Sung team up and work furiously to stay one step ahead of the forces working to set them up for a fall. But as Lee and Sung score some initial wins, the bad guys decide it’s best if the duo disappear altogether. Can Lee leverage the power of quantum physics to imagine a way for him and his team to stay alive?

See It

Park Hae-soo picked up some “best new actor” wins and nominations for playing the smooth-talking, ever-optimistic, slightly nutty guy who started poor, worked his way up to successful nightclub owner, and refuses to sell out his team when things turn sour. I’m told it’s particularly notable how he mimics various regional Korean dialects to cozy up to various other characters. He’s charming and energetic, and you root for him to succeed, or at least not get killed.

There’s nothing deeply philosophical embedded in all of the chatter about quantum physics. It’s just something to wrap some goofy dialog around, and to pay off late in the action when he tries to put his “imagine it and it will happen” theory to a do-or-die test.

But the memorable line, thrown in quite at random is actually this: “If a worry could go away by worrying, then there would be no worries.” Wisdom for the centuries.

There’s something about the title By Quantum Physics: A Nightlife Venture that feels like it was an attempt to start a franchise. This movie turns out to be enough fun for a night’s entertainment, and really that’s enough. If another entangled movie appears on the horizon, I might give that one a view as well.