Hope Review

South Korea's Most Expensive Movie Ever Made is Gloriously Insane

By: Marc Kozak

Hope

South Korea's Most Expensive Movie Ever Made is Gloriously Insane

By: Marc Kozak

For the first 50 minutes of Na Hong-jin’s gloriously insane action movie, Hope, we have very little idea of what exactly it is that’s tearing through a small mountain town. As various townsfolk continue to follow paths of rapidly increasing carnage, they can only speculate as to the responsible party: Is it a bear? A tiger? A really big person on drugs? Slowly but surely, as we get closer and closer to the epicenter of destruction, it starts to become apparent that we’re dealing with something extremely out of the ordinary. Giant holes are smashed through storefront facades. Cars are launched at tremendous speeds hundreds of feet into the air. Explosions of fire dot the countryside. Gunfire is everywhere as people run away from (and often run after) some kind of terrible thing that stays just seconds away from coming into view of the camera.

It’s a wonderfully tense opening that goes on for just long enough that you start to wonder if you’re ever going to see the guilty party, until suddenly there it is, and we’re off on a jaw-dropping, ten-minute chase sequence that rewards the viewer’s patience (and then some), flexing every bit of a production budget (70 billion won/approx. $37 million USD) that is reportedly the highest in the history of South Korean film.

Had the movie ended there, I would’ve been singing its praises to the mountaintops; unfortunately, there were still just under two hours of movie left to go. Most of that time is spent on increasingly preposterous reveals and redundant fight scenes, all culminating in a climax that is so spectacularly absurd that it almost defies belief. Still, you have to admire Hong-jin’s simple ambitions here; this is a movie only interested in giving its audience a good time, full of unpredictable twists, gnarly kills, and the kind of visual excess that would make Michael Bay proud. The details don’t really matter – strap in and get ready to see people on motorcycles going full speed while shooting comically large guns at crazy monsters. This, my friends, is cinema™.

" The details don’t really matter – strap in and get ready to see people on motorcycles going full speed while shooting comically large guns at crazy monsters. "

Our characters are mostly regular ol’ small town folk, often displaying a kind of buffoonish cluelessness that is played for laughs. Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min) is the town’s police chief, spectacularly unprepared for an event of this magnitude. “Call the police!” he screams at one point, cartoonishly flipping off the power-tripping swagger he displayed before all of the chaos started. His only real source of competent help comes from Sung-ae (Squid Game’s Hoyeon), an eager young cop who seems to desperately want to be in an action movie. Otherwise, the town is mostly full of old people, who (in one of the movie’s best running gags) inexplicably keep showing up with an insane level of weaponry, ready to defend the town.

Out in the town’s tree-lined outskirts, we meet Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), a progressively courageous local man who eventually becomes something akin to a near-immortal action hero. “How did he get so good at riding a horse?” someone asks off-frame after Sung-ki pulls off the latest in a series of death-defying escapes, followed later on with, “How did he get so good at shooting?” after a particularly amazing display of marksmanship. The townsfolk interactions are often very funny (even if we are mostly laughing at them instead of actually worrying about them) and help to keep the overall tone light. This isn’t exactly a vehicle for serious drama.

Things really run out of steam in the final half as the two threads of the story combine. What little we learn about the monsters only serves to make us like the humans less, coming dangerously close to the classic moral of “maybe it was us who were the monsters the whole time.” The multitude of battle scenes start to run together, with far less attention paid to scene logistics than there was in the movie’s first half. How many times do we get a shot of the super-fast monsters rapidly closing ground on the person they’re chasing, only for the camera to switch angles and suddenly the monster is far away again? (Answer: it’s a high number.) Hong-jin and cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo seem to run out of interesting ways to shoot a chase, but they just keep coming, nothing more than padding in an already unnecessarily-long 160-minute run time.

You may have looked at the credits and seen that Alicia Vikander and Michael Fassbender are in this movie. I don’t want to give too much away about their…performances…but let’s just say that by the time they arrive, the CGI budget seemed to have run out, with some truly catastrophic results. It’s all part of a truly misguided final act that is more interested in setting up a sequel than making any actual sense, including a final out-of-nowhere moment that ultimately gets you laughing at the movie instead of with it.

Still, this is the kind of over-the-top action movie that you’ll beg your friends to watch in order to share in what is truly a bonkers experience. It’s a shame that Hong-jin (who made the similarly insane The Wailing) couldn’t maintain the kind of confident and bold approach that he teased us with in the first third, before succumbing to what is ultimately a rather drastic drop in quality. Even so, there is a lot of fun to be had here, and I wouldn’t be surprised if this becomes a cult favorite here in the United States; it’s the perfect kind of thing to watch with a group of friends in a loud theater full of incredulous laughter.