I’ve not watched Squid Game but I don’t need to. I already know the plot. Set in a dystopian future yadda-yadda-yadda people play literal life-or-death games and yadda-yadda-yadda one by one they all die. It’s been done to death (pardon the pun). The same can be said for the 2022 Hunt, a South Korea espionage action movie also starring Lee Jung-jae, who directed this movie.
First, let’s address the elephant in the room. It’s set in the 1980s during the politcal turmoil of the country. Even though it’s set about 40 years in the past, too much looks contemporary. In 1979, there was the assassination of Park Chung Hee who was seen as a military dictator and there was a lot of tension following it throughout the 1980s and into the 1990s.
Jung-jae plays Park Pyong-ho, foreign unit chief for the Agency for National Security Planning, and there’s Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung), Domestic Unit chief who are trying to track down a North Korean mole named Donglim. Out of a movie that is 131 minutes with credits, not one minute of sceeentime passes before there’s a lot of blood shed. People are shooting at each other. They get into knock down drag out fistfights. And so many people are tortured sometimes so badly, you just wonder what the hell the plot is.
Yes, this stuff probably did happen during the era. But it’s hard to keep track of who’s who and if they are a good guy and or a bad guy because not even Jung-jae and the co-writer Jo Seung-hee seem to know. It’s obviously Jung-jae patterned the action scenes after John Wick and similar movies including the own action movies from southeast Asia directed by Tsui Hark, Ringo Lam and Jone Woo. And the action scenes might have worked had there been a coherent plot.
Say what you will about all the violence in The Passion of the Christ, but at least you could tell what was going on. I couldn’t here. All I knew was that anyone who appears on screen will eventually be shot at least a dozen times, or tortured for a while, then shot a dozen times.This is like a porno for action movie lovers. The plot is ludicrous to the point you’re just wanting for the action to begin.
But after you’ve gotten your rocks off, you really don’t want to watch the rest. You’ll feel the same way here.
What do you think? Please comment.
Zane Says 