Na Hong-jin’s Wildly Entertaining Korean Monster Epic

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.

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. 

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?”

Sung-ae is a fabulous character — gorgeous, feisty, handy with guns and rocket blasters of any size and fearless behind the wheel at high speed. Model-turned-actress (and Squid Game alumna) Hoyeon is a hoot in her first feature role, from her action moves to her comic timing, unloading a shower of bullets while shrieking things at her target like “You crossed the line!” or “Don’t push your luck, you stinking butthole!” or “Die already, motherfucker!” For a cop in a usually sleepy town populated mostly by the elderly, Sung-ae is a remarkably quick study. I laughed out loud later in the action when Sung-ki impresses her with some sharp shooting while hanging out a speeding cop car window: “What are you, a movie star? So damn hot!”

Korean comedy can often veer broad and wacky, but Na’s handle on it is always judicious. That goes even for an audaciously prolonged monologue from a hospitalized senior, who tells Sung-ae in painstaking detail about a case of spicy pork-induced explosive diarrhea that left him with his pants down when four of the monsters appeared in the mountains: “I swear in all my 70 years I never clenched my hole so tight.” Sung-ae’s reactions are priceless.

Once it’s discovered that there’s a contingent of hostile infiltrators and not just one, the action splits between the cops in town and Sung-ki and his buddies in the mountainside forest, where Na steers the story deeper into classic sci-fi territory.  

But there are also droll interludes like a hilarious scene in which a scientist performs a necropsy on the body of one of the creatures; when blades and saws of increasing size prove inadequate to cut through its skin, she suits up in protective plastic-wear like Patrick Bateman and fires up a chainsaw.

It’s also a nice touch that Bum-seok shows his compassionate side. After noticing what he believes are tears in the monster’s eyes once he and Sung-ae have it on the run, he’s appalled to learn that the violent rage being visited upon them was caused by the reckless actions of an idiotic human (Eum Moon-suk). Hwang makes Bum-seok an endearing lead by barking orders one minute and looking stricken with terror the next; he’s the essence of the vulnerable hero.

Set piece after kickass set piece, the movie delivers, from the vehicular daredevilry to the electrifying horseback scenes in the forest, with lots of superbly choreographed clashes. All the principal characters eventually converge there before being chased out onto a mountain highway. Don’t ask how and where international castmembers Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander, Taylor Russell and Cameron Britton fit into all this. You would ruin the surprise, part of which seems like a possible sequel setup.

Cinematographer Hong Kyung-pyo’s camerawork is a marvel of kinetic energy, full of breathtaking pans and tracking sequences that eschew the usual jumpy handheld approach to scenes with this kind of intensity. Editor Kim Sunmin’s vigorous cutting folds dialogue-driven and action scenes into a fluid package that never loosens its grip. And the score by Michael Abels (who collaborated with Jordan Peele on Get Out and Nope) is an all-timer, unsettling and steeped in dread to start and then frenetically nerve-shredding as things get hairier.

Effects work is excellent, even with some messy CG touches, and the creature designs strikingly original. From its magnetic principals to its cheeky sense of humor, its fresh take on sci-fi horror to its thrilling action, Hope is a crazy good time.