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Before the film Two Cops, the buddy detective genre had long been considered Hollywood-ish. Local cop flicks instead preferred to portray a single maverick character’s actions or his team’s investigations, like in the Public Enemy series, rather than partnerships between two detectives. For example, in cop movies like Nowhere To Hide, Memories Of Murder and Wild Card, two main characters with contradictory personalities are prominent in the story, but they are still just members of homicide investigation units. Additionally, movies based on Korean real life stories, such as Memories Of Murder and Wild Card, both which were praised by in-service detectives, highlighted the industry’s tendency to focus on Korean true-crimes.

Since 2010, the buddy detective genre has really caught fire with numerous, successful attempts to combine colorful characters with regular detectives. 2015 buddy cop film, KWAK Kyung-taek’s The Classified File seems to offer the best of both worlds. Though the film features the genre’s required mismatch pairing, this time a detective with a clairvoyant mystic, it was actually the dramatization of the police investigation of a real kidnapping case that took place in Busan in 1978. The film’s two characters were named after real people as well.