'Hope' Review: Na Hong-jin’s Wildly Entertaining Korean Monster Epic
'Hope'
Neon/Courtesy Everett Collection
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There’s a sly sight gag relatively early in Na Hong-jin’s blockbuster-in-the-making, Hope, in which the camera gazes over the wreckage of a rural village in the Korean Demilitarized Zone, lingering just a moment on a propaganda sign reading “Protect the Nation From Infiltration.” It’s a little late to heed that warning even though at that point, the infiltration is still believed to be a single-digit threat. But that one rampaging invader unleashes enough destruction and mayhem for a whole army, hurling cars and trucks and motorcycles through the air like toys, tearing though buildings as if they were made of cardboard, and leaving the streets littered with bloodied corpses.
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It’s a great feeling to know from a movie’s first frames that you’re in the hands of an assured genre auteur. The rare action thriller that takes place almost entirely in broad daylight, Hope pulls you in immediately with its virtuoso camerwork, pulse-pounding score, adrenalized pacing and sharply drawn characters.
Hope
The Bottom Line
A wildly entertaining assault of turbo-charged thrills.
Venue: Cannes Film Festival (Competition)
Cast: Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Eum Moon-suk
Director-screenwriter: Na Hong-jin
2 hours 40 minutes
Having landed on the map with three features made in an eight-year span, The Chaser, The Yellow Sea and The Wailing, Na returns after a decade’s absence with a movie that makes those predecessors look like a warmup act. Hope, a title whose meaning becomes clear only in the final scenes, is a superbly sustained pedal-to-the-metal experience that’s almost dizzying in its bravura. It’s a long sit at two-hours-40-minutes, but one that never allows your attention to wander, pausing for breathing space only intermittently and lacing those brief spells of downtime with invigorating shots of off-kilter humor.
The movie opens with Hope Harbor police chief Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min, reuniting with Na after The Wailing) arriving at a scene of vicious slaughter that left a mutilated bull dead in the middle of the road with massive claw marks gouged deep into its fur and flesh. The lifeless animal was discovered and reported by a group of five hunters, led by Sung-ki (Zo In-sung), by far the savviest of the bunch.
Bum-seok listens impatiently to their second-hand accounts of tiger tracks being sighted in the mountains, leading them to assume the animal must have wandered all the way down from Siberia. But the cop doesn’t buy that scenario, given that the area is surrounded by barbed wire fencing and landmines, making it unlikely that any beast large enough to do that kind of damage could have gotten through.
A by-the-book law enforcement officer who affects a hard-ass demeanor, Bum-seok seems less concerned about an apex predator on the loose than whether the rifles of Sung-ki’s dim-bulb hunting buddies are properly registered.
That changes when Sung-ki and Co. set off for the mountain forests on a tiger hunt while Bum-seok heads back into town, annoyed to learn from his female colleague at the base, Sung-ae (Hoyeon), that tiger panic is already spreading and backup from the reservist squad is unavailable due to a wildfire. He rolls into the village commercial district to find it half-destroyed and gets caught up with various locals as they attempt to shoot what one of them describes as “a freaking monster.”
It’s roughly 45 minutes into the movie when we get our first glimpse of that monster, as a clawed hand reaches out in a darkened tunnel that used to be a store, grabbing a wounded man by the head and flinging him against the wall like a rag doll. Soon after, we get a better look, and for the sake of spoilers, let’s just say it’s no tiger.
The frenzied chase through town, with the creature sprinting like an Olympian, is an insanely accelerated sequence, one of many in which flying vehicles, debris and bodies are weaponized against anyone in the intruder’s path. Bum-seok seems done for until Sung-ae turns up with a cop car full of military-grade weapons to slow the thing down. In what’s almost a running joke, the chief asks his agent where she got all that firepower and she huffs: “What does that matter now?”
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