A Hard Day

A Hard Day is a 2021 Filipino action thriller film directed by Lawrence Fajardo and produced by Arlene Tamayo. It is based on the 2014 South Korean film of the same name by Kim Seong-hun, starring Dingdong Dantes and John Arcilla and it is an official entry to the 2021 Metro Manila Film Festival. The movie was produced by VIVA Films. Plot Edmund Villon (Dingdong Dantes), a corrupt detective whose mother recently died, drives away in the middle of the funeral, having been informed that his squad is being investigated by internal affairs for bribery. He crashes into a homeless man who wanders onto the road, killing him. Fearing manslaughter charges as he is intoxicated, Edmund declines to call the police, and hides the body from a passing patrol car. With the body in his trunk, he returns to the funeral and manages to seal the body into his mother's coffin while escaping detection. However, he realizes that the man's cell phone is also in the coffin after sealing it. A few days later, Edmund purposely gets into another crash to conceal the earlier damage and give him a reason to visit a repair shop. To the fortune of Edmund and his squad, the internal affairs investigation is cancelled by a lieutenant named Franco. Edmund's squad is then assigned to locate and arrest a wanted murderer named Apyong (Nor Domingo), who is revealed to be the homeless man. While searching Apyong's hideout, the squad finds nothing significant, but they meet another police officer who is investigating a hit-and-run incident based on an anonymous tip. Apyong's hideout is right next to the site of the collision, and a traffic camera is nearby. The squad examines the low-quality camera footage, noting that the model of the colliding car is the same as Edmund's. The triangulation of Apyong's phone points to the area near Edmund's mother's grave. It is revealed that the driver of the patrol car who drove past Edmund after he killed Apyong was Ace Franco (John Arcilla), the lieutenant who shut down the investigation into Edmund's team. Franco outranks Edmund, and although he witnessed Edmund's collision, he doesn't know where the body was taken. Rather than formally report Edmund, Franco blackmails him and demands possession of the body. Edmund excavates the coffin and searches Apyong, discovering bullet wounds on his body which indicate that Apyong had been shot before Edmund hit him.