‘Squid Game’ Star’s Movie Bloodbath Rattles Cannes
Hunt is—excitingly or disappointingly, depending on your preferences—not a gritty, character-based reboot of the Mission: Impossible franchise, but instead a political thriller from South Korea, made by Squid Game’s breakout star Lee Jung-jae in his directorial debut. The fact that Hunt is so clearly a debut, with all the messy, bumpy execution that that implies, is partially offset by the film’s sheer energy and its walloping budget, which help turn the whole exercise into a wham-bam guns ‘n’ explosions romp.
At the outset of Hunt, a series of stern title cards and hilariously broad exposition scenes feed us a lot of information as to the political situation in which the movie is embedded: that is, the apex of military dictatorship in South Korea in the 1980s, when the country was seeking a path toward Western growth. In these opening vignettes, the camera works busily, ferreting its way through crowds, zooming hither and thither, and generally giving a fine sense of urgency, as intelligence officers watch over a student demonstration that has the potential to turn violent—which it does, suddenly and almost parodically, launching the film into wholly different territory, as it then turns into a straight-up, essentially apolitical shoot-‘em-up. Here, with the violence turned up to eleven, Lee Jung-jae indulges in some big set pieces that clearly interest him more, and have consequently been given more budget, than all the stuff to do with political intrigue. This pre-credits sequence gives the measure of the film as a whole, which sometimes seems to lose track of its own intentions, or become weirdly bored of its own narrative beats, before summoning some energy for a crunchy fist fight on a staircase.
As to the story itself: Jung-jae, directing himself in one of two lead roles, plays Park Pyong-ho, an intelligence officer whose investigation into the existence of a mole within his organization brings him into conflict with Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung), another spy chief. Park and Kim are not terrifically well delineated, with both actors bringing a stern, hard-boiled intransigence to their roles. Indeed, the enmity, and then collaboration, between these two mismatched cop figures brings to mind, in an unflattering way, the bruising dynamic between Guy Pearce-Russell Crowe in L.A. Confidential: in that film, both characters are allowed to push up against one another, complement each other, and grow together—while in Hunt, the protagonists are merely offered a series of hot-blooded encounters, a big old dust-up in the corridors of power, and a final set piece with the world exploding all around them. This is all very well for the purposes of delivering a messy action vehicle, but begins to pall somewhat around the 80-minute mark, when the film is still, stubbornly but half-heartedly, trying to get you interested in some emotional subplot.