Na Hong-jin makes chase movies and it can be incredible where they go.
As if a 156-minute run time wasn’t enough, it was also made with a sequel in mind. But despite its heft in scale and run time, it rarely pauses to take a breath. Though some of Na’s contemporaries are better known in the West, the South Korean writer-director has for two decades been a must-see filmmaker for breathless spectacles laced with pointed satire and scruffy humanity. It is not always a smooth ride. And the movie is overlong, sapping some of its momentum. But it is often thrillingly shape-shifting: a gloriously unwieldy spectacle that fuses monster movie and science fiction into a blistering and bonkers saga of otherness — human and otherwise. It will be almost an hour before we get a look at what he’s after. Once we do, it’s a bit of a letdown. The CGI makeup of the creature — a towering but lean and sinewy alien that sometimes stands tall and sometimes runs on all fours — is a little schlocky in design. But it’s telling that Na’s movie turns on a slow-motion close-up, when Bum-seok recognizes something like pain in the eyes of the marauding monster. Na’s movies have never been particularly kind to the authorities; they’re usually shown as either incompetent or corrupt. But Bum-seok is at least charging forward, albeit not with as much panache as his fellow officer Sung-ae . She joins the chase midway, elegantly speeding into the fray in a squad car while shooting out the window. But for now, we get the movie’s grand, galloping finale. Production designer Lee Hwok-young delights in the debris of destruction. Should Na continue this saga? That final sequence has you hoping.
His latest, “Hope,” is his biggest and wildest movie yet. His appropriately titled 2008 debut, “The Chaser,” focused on a pimp and former police officer trying to find a missing sex worker in a helter-skelter search through nocturnal Seoul. The scope of “Hope,” his first film in a decade, is so vast that Na spent two years in post-production toiling over it before premiering it at the Cannes Film Festival in May — in a slightly different cut than is now arriving in theaters. But through those two and a half-plus hours, “Hope” hurtles its way through genres the way the Kool-Aid Man crashed through walls. The CGI in “Hope” won’t win any awards. In “Hope,” they’re mostly bumbling or way out of their depth. This is the big-screen debut of Hoyeon, of “Squid Game,” and, from the very first moment, she’s winning. Whether Na’s film, said to be the most expensive Korean film ever made, gets a follow-up remains to be seen. Up until then, “Hope” is mostly a cluttered film. Yet “Hope” clears out for a sensational, open-road, wide-expanse chase scene that’s one of the most exhilarating and ludicrous sequence of the year.
