Yoo Young-chul, the "Devil," was executed by hanging in Seoul Detention Centre in 2018. He remains one of the most reviled figures in modern Korean history.
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. is the gangster the cop the devil based on true story
When the credits roll on Lee Won-tae’s blistering 2019 action thriller The Gangster, The Cop, The Devil , viewers are often left with one burning question: Could that really have happened? Yoo Young-chul, the "Devil," was executed by hanging
By inventing the "pact" between the gangster and the cop, the film creates a tense moral chess match. The audience is forced to root for a murderer (the mob boss) and a rule-breaker (the cop) against a worse monster (the serial killer). The famous scene where Don Lee handcuffs himself to the detective to force cooperation is pure fiction, but it is the emotional heart of the movie. The film asks us to imagine a world