Kim Pan-chok is assigned to work in the sales promotion department of Yumi Inc., a sweetener manufacturer. He falls ill after a heated sales war with Gammi Inc., a leading competitor and is hospitalized. He devises a genius plan while in the hospital.

Detective Woo is on the trail of the mysterious gangster Sungmin, a master of disguise who always manages to elude his pursuers. Eventually, the cop tracks down and confronts the master-criminal in the suburbs of a coal-mining town.

A group of people whose lives suffer from stagnation, are working together in the same company and their lives are scutinized by those who see them. There is the development manager whose last new idea was five years earlier; a procrastinating office clerk with a crush on a co-worker that he is too shy to reveal; and a senior manager who believes his wife is having an affair causing him to take out his frustration on all his employees.

On 31 January 1968, 31 North Korean commandos infiltrated South Korea in a failed mission to assassinate President Park Chung-hee. In revenge, the South Korean military assembled a team of 31 criminals on the island of Silmido to kill Kim Il-sung for a suicide mission to redeem their honor, but was cancelled, leaving them frustrated. It is loosely based on a military uprising in the 1970s.