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.