Low Life

Oh Hee-dong and his uncle Gwan-seok
(click any image to enlarge)

Low Life is a Korean TV heist caper set in the 1970s. It starts with a man, Gwan-seok, and his nephew Oh Hee-dong getting out of prison. They're nothing more than a couple of petty criminals. While in prison they had heard a story of a fisherman who had brought up a valuable piece of pottery in his net. The pottery had come from a wreck of an old Chinese vessel that was carrying gold and precious Song and Yuan dynasty pottery to Japan which had sunk in Korean waters in 1323. 

Gwan-seok decides that they'll try to dive on the wreck to recover some of the pottery which is extremely valuable. He connects with a shady pottery dealer, who deals in forged as well as authentic pottery, to use him as his fence. 

To fund the endeavor the fence connects him with Yang Jung-sook, the gold-digging wife a rich developer. She has her own agenda. Her husband is building an urban complex, and she plans on upping her social status by adding a museum to it where she will display the pottery. Well, display some of it in the front, the rest of the museum will be full of forgeries, and she'll sell the remaining pieces to turn a tidy profit.

Yang Jung-sook the financer for the looting

Gwan-seok gathers up his nephew and some flunkies and heads to the coastal village he'll run the salvaging operation from. The boat captain he intends on using, who is perhaps the sketchiest character on the show, decides his boat is too small and so he has to borrow his cousin's larger vessel. 

Everybody in the fishing village knows about the wreck, and so they quickly figure out what the boys from Seoul are up to. The local goons aren't happy to see Gwan-seok's gang roll into town and so a fight soon ensues. 

However, older heads prevail and they decide, due to the stakes of the operation, to pool forces because the job is too big to do alone. Regardless, bad blood simmers between the two groups which threatens to break into more fighting at any moment. Oh, they also bribe the local police to turn a blind eye to what they are up to. 

The Seoul goons face-off against the bumpkin goons

As the show goes on it becomes apparent that they really don't know what they are doing. They have no idea of how to loot a sunken ship, so most of their plans go completely awry and they try to fix things by brute forcing it with more people. This only deepens their problems because more people mean more shares to be divided, and dividing shares, which is already a complex enough problem, is made worse by their greed and mistrust of each other. And that mistrust is well deserved, because these dirtballs would, and do, back-stab each other in an instant.

Of course, it all goes pear-shaped, and watching things go off the rails is a lot of the fun of the show. It's well-done: nicely filmed, written, and acted. It is certainly worth watching. I saw it on Disney, I'm not sure if you could find it elsewhere. 

Their fine salvage ships