by Anthony O'Connor
Worth: $9.50
FilmInk rates movies out of $20 — the score indicates the amount we believe a ticket to the movie to be worth
Cast:
Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-sung, Hoyeon, Eum Moon-suk, Lee Sang-hee, Im Hyun-sik, Michael Fassbender, Alicia Vikander
Intro:
… a nearly plotless, depth-avoiding machine that takes good ideas and bludgeons them to death with repetition, repetition, repetition.
Hope is the story of Bum-seok (Hwang Jung-min), the police chief of Hope Harbour, a small village near the Demilitarized Zone in South Korea. Life in the hamlet tends to be quiet and a bit dull, that is until some nameless nasty starts tearing up the local citizens, bovine and human alike. So, it’s up to Bum-seok to rally his fellow coppers, and any locals, to stop the monstrous threat before everyone ends up as red paste rotting in the sun. But why is the creature so stroppy and could there be more of them?
At its core, Hope has enough juice to be a fantastically entertaining 90-minute creature feature, tightly constructed and deftly executed. Unfortunately, director Na Hong-jin has delivered a 2.5+ hour slog, sure to brutalise the attention span of even the most patient cinephile. Now, you might think a film of that length spends a lot of time setting up character arcs, the world and the themes that the work would explore, right? Nup. Hope wants to hit the ground running and lurch from one action set piece to the next. Which is fine in theory, hell it worked for Mad Max: Fury Road, but Hope doesn’t have anywhere near enough ideas to keep things fresh, so it just repeats the same ones over and over and over.
And over.
Hope is a nearly plotless, depth-avoiding machine that takes good ideas and bludgeons them to death with repetition, repetition, repetition. Do you like action scenes where a character is chased by a monster, narrowly avoids being minced as the leggy creature slams into a wall or tree, and then starts running again? We hope so, because you’ll be seeing that shit approximately 6,487 times before the credits roll. How about moments where characters shoot at bulletproof monsters for five minutes, reload, and do it all again until it feels downright Sisyphean? Well, this flick has got you covered and then some. Also, was the dialogue improvised? It seems unlikely that any sane person would have typed the cavalcade of banalities that these characters blurt into Final Draft, because it’s all the same shouty, sweary bickering in every single scene.
What’s sad is that Na Hong-jin (The Wailing) isn’t a bad director, there are genuinely tense and compelling scenes, particularly in the film’s setup. Unfortunately, this cinematic ouroboros also taints its better moments through the dull thudding entropy of overfamiliarity. There’s a car chase near Hope’s (merciful) conclusion that is so redundant, so repetitious, it verges on the avant-garde. As if the ghost of David Lynch had teamed up with the creators of Too Many Cooks in an attempt to lampoon the recursive nature of action cinema. Sadly, that’s not what’s happening.
The truth is, Hope is a film with no sense of restraint, rising tension or payoff, and the result is an unwieldy, maddening misfire that squanders its potential and, most galling of all, doesn’t even have a definitive ending. It also seems to be setting up a bloody sequel, something that feels more like a threat than a promise. Put simply: your life will be a lot better with less Hope in it.
