Summary
Mission: Cross is a fun crime comedy offering a uniquely different wife and husband duo.
Mission: Cross is like a South Korean Mr. and Mrs. Smith, without high-octane sexual tension and playfulness. It leans toward an exhausting, miserable marriage, where you coexist together rather than live with the passion of romance. I suppose that’s the twist in the premise. At least, that’s what I got from it.
The plot follows big-shot police detective Kang Mi-seon — a highly skilled officer who’s trigger-happy with her taser and has an abundance of MMA skills. Her husband, Park Kang-mu, lives a regular, working life while depending on his wife for money, even taking it from her purse while she sleeps. Unbeknown to Mi-seon, her husband was an agent at an Intelligence Agency. One day, she suspects her husband is having an affair but slowly uncovers a secret mission.
The initial charm of Mission: Cross is that Mi-seon does not feel highly for her husband. She has an attitude that suggests she finds him quite pathetic. She is presumed to be masculine and has no idea she is married to a highly resourceful man.
The South Korean film essentially works in two effective story strands: Kang-mu investigates a criminal conspiracy with a past female colleague, while Mi-seon investigates whether her husband is sleeping with another woman. As the movie progresses, these two overarching stories slowly combine for a well-constructed crime comedy. If there are any compliments for this Netflix movie, it is that its writing pays dividends, regardless of its far-fetched nature.
Mission: Cross never slows down. The mysteries surrounding the criminal conspiracy never ebb away and remain even in the third act. Mi-seon’s sense of disrespect towards her husband helps, too — she almost treats him like a child, and that’s the comedy angle. Viewers will be compelled by marriage with little chemistry but with the potential to be so much more. You are eager for the wife and husband to be an action duo, and the film does well to tease its audience at the prospect of it.
The one downside to the movie is that it spends much of its runtime getting deeper into the overarching crime when the selling point is the two leads. The conspiracy thickens, too, almost to an Austin Powers level, where the villains come across as rather silly. And the twists feel neverending. Whenever you think you have the answer to the characters’ problems, a new piece of information arises. The overuse of a “spy agent” story is a little exhausting.
And I suppose that’s because writer and director Lee Myung Hoon had a lot of ideas for Mission: Cross, which are stuffed into its runtime—I’d love to understand if the director’s cut had way more. There’s undoubtedly a world here to be explored, and you can feel the director had more to do. However, he gets the best out of his cast, who seemingly have fun with the script and give it their all.
Overall, I had a lot of fun with Mission: Cross and respected the work that went into it. It’s not the best husband-and-wife duo movie, especially as it centers on zero chemistry, but the concept behind it works all the same. I did, admittedly, check my watch at the hour mark—crime comedies can get a little tedious at times, in my opinion. But if you love South Korean film and TV, then this is a good time.
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