Kang I-an (Yoon Kye-sang) wakes up in a car crash, his memory gone; Whenever he looks in any reflective surface (and there are a lot of them at hand in this movie), he sees another man's face. It's unclear how, but it seems he knows he's not in his own body, something that's driven violently home when a few hours later reality shifts around him and he finds himself in the body of a completely different man.
Every twelve hours, like clockwork. he's dropped in the shoes of a someone from within a group of what ends up being a bunch of really shady people. Making things more complicated, the people he inhabited are still walking around, the twelve hours he spent in their body completely forgotten.
Kang I-an (Ian? Ian!) enlists the help of a (pretty unfunny) homeless comedy sidekick to try and figure out what's happening, and finds that everyone he's been possessing is part of some ill-defined conspiracy. What's more, they're somehow related to the fate of a certain badass lady (Lim Ji-yeon) he feels compelled to seek out and protect.
Ian Spiritwalker's situation is immediately engaging, but it loses a lot of steam very quickly: unwieldy dialog, a confusing throughline, and a rotating cast of poorly defined characters to act as the protagonist often threaten to do the movie in. The prosaic, boring conspiracy at the heart of the movie and a hilariously terrible explanation for Ian's superpower don't exactly redeem things either.
It's that slickness, along with a relatively fleet pace and some pretty good action, that ultimately make the movie a success. Director Yoon Jae-geun can't quite hammer his script into a good narrative, but it's expertly seasoned with car chases, close-quarter scraps and firefights (which end up becoming a close-quarter firefight for the obligatory John Wick-influenced finale). There's not nearly as many action sequences as I would have liked, but they're all a lot of fun and full of neat stunts which the sometimes over-busy camerawork captures well. I also appreciated how analog a lot of it is (not always a given with modern Korean cinema), especially an excellent car chase and some very chunky explosive work to mark bullet impacts.
It's a little too slick for its own good - a fun time, but not particularly memorable. The acting is fine, and I imagine everyone involved relished the challenge of differentiating their normal personas from those times they're being puppeteered by Ian. You can definitely tell who was good with the martial arts and who wasn't based on the editing style used for their fight scenes (which are a little too reliant on quick cuts even at their best).
The only distinct character besides the mystery woman and comedy indigent is (I think) Yoo Seung-mok, playing a coked-out corrupt cop who's channeling the same over-the-top villainy as Gary Oldman in The Professional. Elsewhere, a betrayal from a supposedly major character treated by the movie as a momentous event barely even registers, which is oddly emblematic of the film's problems.
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