3/5 stars Dingdong Dantes headlines A Hard Day , the third official remake of Kim Seong-hun’s 2014 South Korean hit, after the Aaron Kwok-fronted Peace Breaker (2017) and French adaptation Restless from earlier this year. Director Law Fajardo’s efficiently executed tale of a bad police officer having an even worse day hews commendably close to Kim’s original, but drops the dark humour in favour of more conventional action beats. John Arcilla, Volpi Cup winner for best actor at the Venice film festival for On the Job: The Missing 8 , elevates the material whenever on screen as the film’s merciless antagonist. Detective Edmund Villon (Dantes) is already under investigation by Internal Affairs when he is involved in a hit-and-run accident while driving to his mother’s wake. In a moment of panic, Villon bundles the dead pedestrian into the boot of his car and flees the scene, only to be flagged down at a police checkpoint, which leads to a violent altercation. By the time Villon arrives at the funeral home, and is met by his increasingly impatient sister (Meg Imperial) and daughter (Lhiane Key Gimeno), Villon learns that IA officers are ransacking his desk and looking to search his car. From this point on, A Hard Day spirals into a catastrophic comedy of errors, as Villon attempts to offload the corpse and cover his tracks. The situation is exacerbated when he is assigned a cold case linked to the man he ran over, and receives a phone call from a mysterious witness (Arcilla) looking to blackmail him. However, Fajardo and screenwriter Arlene Tamayo make the call to play the material dead straight. Villon is not the exasperated buffoon his Korean predecessor was, but rather an ostensibly good guy who has cut a few corners to provide for his loved ones. This shift in tone largely exonerates Villon of his prior misdeeds, acknowledging that the entire force is on the take so even the good guys get their hands dirty on occasion. This places the burden of responsibility squarely on Arcilla’s shoulders to be unremittingly villainous. Fortunately for the film, and the audience, the seasoned veteran gamely steps up to the challenge, playing the even dirtier Lieutenant Franco as a relentless opportunist and monstrous sadist for whom human life holds no value. Fajardo also tosses audiences a fistful of tautly choreographed fight sequences to compensate for the overall po-faced tone, but we are yet to see a remake that captures the gleeful schadenfreude that defined the original. A Hard Day is streaming on Netflix. Want more articles like this? Follow SCMP Film on Facebook