Notable Cast: Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Alicia
Vikander, Michael Fassbender, Taylor Russell, Cameron Britton, Lee Sang-hee, Um
Mun-suk, Im Hyun-sik
For the start of this review, I want to note that Na
Hong-jin, as a director and a writer, had already crafted three films that I
would be very tempted to consider masterpieces. The Yellow Sea and The
Chaser are incredibly grounded, gritty thrillers that blend action, drama,
and horror nearly perfectly. The Wailing, his third film, is a masterpiece that
sucker-punches its audience with suffocating folk-horror elements that bleed
into dark comedy and some of the most thrilling slow-burn storytelling in genre
cinema.
Which is why, after seeing his latest ‘epic,’ Hope, I
feel…dysregulated.
Hope is Na Hong-jin drilling further into genre
cinema with his swing at an action-spectacle flick. He once again weaves genres
together in unconventional ways, and manages to craft a film that is, in the
moment, absolutely thrilling to endure, with massive action set pieces,
incredibly charming characters, and some of the most tense chases you will see
in a film this year - if not this decade. Can’t say I wasn’t absolutely engaged
through most of its 2.5+ hour runtime.
Yet, Hope is also perhaps the messiest and most
baffling film I’ve seen this year. Moment to moment, I was glued to the screen,
but its narrative and storytelling are wildly off-kilter at times, setting up
expectations for characters, plot, or narrative, then either ignoring them or
hammering them home with the power of 10 metric tons of nuclear alien fire. It
makes choices that either make it the greatest dumb movie of all time or the
dumbest great movie of all time. Depending on how you want to read Na
Hong-jin’s intentions, I suppose.
Hope isn't the first film about a small-town sheriff
and a small team trying to take on a possible alien/monster presence. The
director/writer has been very upfront about his love of genre cinema, and Hope
wears it on its sleeves. In particular, the film feels very Hollywood. Its
blend of off-beat humor, wild action spectacle, and nonsense science fiction
elements easily invokes films like Transformers - although Michael Bay
very much feels like an influence here - it is far better made than any film
he’s made in decades. Yet its influence shows throughout, even in the film’s
unevenness and sporadic narrative.
However, what Na Hong-jin does well with how Hope
plays out is to leave its audience breathless. The film starts off with about
10 or 15 minutes of setup, where Sheriff Bum-seok, played by Blood Brothers’
favorite Hwang Jung-min, is called out by some hunters to look at a mutilated
cow on the outskirts of town. Don’t be fooled, though; this film has no real
interest in building up what this town or its characters are prior to the
events that quickly take place. It moves too fast to slow down for real
character development or arcs, or even to establish its setting. When the
sheriff Bum-seok is heading back to town, he gets the call that there is a
monster on the loose, and by the time he gets there, practically the entire
place is in the process of being demolished.
What transpires for the next 45 minutes is an incredible
action set piece. Bold to create a chase sequence that lasts that long,
particularly in the first act, but here we are. Between the incredible
cinematography, production design, and the manner in which the film manages to
introduce wild tangents of various one-scene characters within the mayhem, it’s
almost operatic. Bum-seok huffs and puffs his way into trying to stop the alien
monster; there are massive explosions and horrific deaths, and it caps off with
one of the greatest hero introductions of Officer Lim, played by Squid Game
breakout star Hoyeon, who turns out to be the most skilled grenade launcher
shooter and high-speed U-turn driver of all time. Ah yes, while that first
chunk certainly felt rushed, and while this definitely feels very redundant in
how long it runs, this is what Hope is going to be. A wild-ass action
flick.
Yet, that’s not exactly what Hope is as a film. For
all of its love of action tropes that it displays flamboyantly on screen -
including perhaps the most fetishistic treatment of guns since the John Wick
films - there are often times that the film actively switches a trope
mid-moment. If you’ve seen any other film by Na Hong-jin, you know this is one
of his greatest auteur aspects. In Hope, though, it often feels baffling
and messy.
For example, at one point, a strange fellow (certainly coded
as low-intelligence and highly strange) is introduced as having killed one of
the aliens himself. This character would often be introduced as the comedic
relief and, to be fair, it feels like the film initially does that with how
Sheriff Bum-seok reacts to him, but it soon plays him off with a creepy and
often unnerving tone - like perhaps he belongs to the Sawyer family from Texas
Chainsaw Massacre. It’s a weird choice that tonally feels off from the rest
of the film.
This happens numerous times. Even in the world it builds, most of it doesn’t make sense. Our lead character is a local sheriff with family ties in the area, but doesn’t seem to know anyone in the town? The monster aliens are treated as absolute animals, akin to the Xenomorph from the Alien franchise, until the final 20 minutes? The film spends an entire scene comparing the aliens to people in their build, but then comments on their internal organs, and they essentially never come up again? There are seemingly dozens of narrative and plot threads that are introduced and never addressed again, or ones that distinctively go against what the film has set up before, but not in the great “look at this reveal!” kind of way to get its audience hooked in.
That’s all before the ending of the film. The final sequence
is comprised of another grandiose action sequence that has the small team of
heroes heading into the woods to save the group of hunters from the opening, a
secondary plot that reveals more questions and more aliens for the second half
of the film, and results in another stunningly executed series of action
sequences, from gun battles in the woods to a highway chase in a police car
that challenges Fast 6 for the longest stretch of flat road surface in cinema
history. This is also where it's revealed that the casting of Alicia Vikander
and Michael Fassbender is for poorly rendered alien faces (which, to be fair,
look like PS3 graphics and oddly stick out compared to so much of the better
effects in the film). That is only the tip of the iceberg.
Because the final 10 minutes might be some of the most
egregious sequel setups of all time. Not even in a fun way. It introduces
entirely new plot lines, new thematic concepts around destiny and fate, and
leaves none of the story or narrative of the previous 2 hours feeling finished.
I was astounded.
Granted, the film has received plenty of praise from critics
and audiences for its audacity and its wild-ass storytelling, but Hope
left me feeling fairly befuddled as its end credits rolled. On one hand, the
action sequences are incredible. They are brilliantly constructed blends of
CGI, stunts, performances, tone, and pacing. The cast is absolutely eating
scenery throughout, including a raucous role for Zo In-sung as the head hunter
in the woods who, despite being thrown around like a rag doll and beaten to a
pulp, will not die. I’ll even give Na Hong-jin credit for knowing his tropes
and for pulling the rug out on his audience with setups and payoffs.
Still, for all that, Hope feels disjointed, with no
real layering beneath the spectacle. These characters feel like hollow
doppelgangers of real people; the script has no clear thematic thread, and the
places, people, and things feel utterly disconnected from any reality - even the
one built in the film. Part of me feels like all of this is intentional. Na
Hong-jin is the kind of provocative filmmaker who bucks tropes for a good
twist, embeds dark comedy or satire in his films, and has no problem rejecting
the most convenient path to an end.
Could he be, in his own loving way, mocking the Hollywood
spectacle sci-fi actioner? Maybe. In the end, though, compared to the
razor-sharp balancing act and execution of his previous films, Hope
feels like it would rather cozy up to the Paul W. S. Anderson and Michael Bay
world of hollowed-out spectacle rather than find a way to use it as something
more.
No comments:
Post a Comment