Hunt review: Squid Game star Lee Jung-jae made one hell of an action movie

The South Korean motion film Hunt will not be a comedy. It’s a bloody spy film with lethal stakes, stuffed with bloody battle and grotesque torture. The stellar motion sequences make it clear that no one on this political face-off is having enjoyable — all the primary gamers are powered by self-righteous conviction that solely they will save their nation and their authorities, and any atrocities they commit in pursuit of that purpose are legitimate and justified.

However there’s nonetheless a way of wry humor to the way in which all of it goes down, because the back-and-forth battle between factions will get so convoluted that even the brokers displaying up on the web site of the newest battle don’t all the time appear to know what aspect they’re on. Squid Recreation star Lee Jung-jae, making his directorial debut and starring as one of many two fundamental leads, hardly ever suggestions his hand over into revealing that this whole political recreation is a little bit of a farce. It’s a lethal recreation performed by paranoid, violent folks. However the film’s strongest moments come when the motion will get so ridiculous that the viewers virtually has to snigger, at the same time as they’re questioning who’s going to die subsequent.

Lee stars as Park Pyong-ho, the chief of the KCIA International Unit, South Korea’s abroad intelligence company. Chief Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung) is his counterpart, the pinnacle of the KCIA’s Home Unit. In idea, they share the identical targets and are working collectively to guard their president, a notoriously merciless dictator. (The movie is about in a fictionalized model of the Nineteen Eighties, drawing on a interval of super unrest and rebel within the nation.) When an murderer targets the president throughout a go to to Washington, D.C., Park and Kim are instructed there’s a North Korean mole someplace within the KCIA, and so they every launch a separate investigation to trace down the traitor.

The plot will get so convoluted that it’s tough to observe at instances, notably in the course of the extraordinarily fast-paced and action-oriented early going, when every new revelation, growth, and shifting suspicion sends swarms of functionally similar black-suited KCIA brokers into battle. Suspects are nabbed and tortured, rescued and traded, guarded and murdered, because the company activates itself and its two leaders each try to control the system and reply to a collection of leaders with totally different targets.

At instances, the disaster of the second doesn’t appear any extra particularly vital than the McGuffin the characters are chasing in any explicit sequence of a Star Wars film. Every new growth — a botched North Korean infiltration, a number of defectors, KCIA management modifications, a key witness in a coma, a suspicious firm laundering cash — largely serves as an excuse for Kim and Park to make new strikes and refine their theories about who’s guilty. However as Hunt comes into focus as a cat-and-mouse recreation between these two males, who each accuse one another after which attempt to discover proof, the stakes regularly slender and turn into intensely private. What begins out as an virtually giddy celebration of Untouchables-style operatic violence turns right into a bitter espionage drama about how far persons are prepared to go for his or her beliefs.

Seen solely as an motion film, Hunt is one in every of 2022’s most fun and horrifying experiences. Lee makes use of that early assassination try as a calling card to ascertain his credentials as a choreographer of gunplay, assuring the viewers that they’re in succesful and bold palms. The complete film is a tug of struggle between sympathies and suspicions, as each side commit horrible acts within the identify of reality. The movie takes it as a provided that there’s no justice to be present in a dictatorship, and that residents are prone to be arrested, tortured, and probably murdered on skinny suspicions, or for sheer political expediency. It’s a bitter tackle the spy story, one the place wish-fulfillment heroism doesn’t have a lot place, and there aren’t any swaggering James Bonds — simply bloody-handed functionaries jockeying for survival. Lee performs the motion for pleasure, however retains circling again to remind the viewers of the human price.

Photograph: Magnet Releasing

However by the tip, Hunt has additionally was a formidable drama and character piece — one the place the feelings are outsized, exaggerated, and expressed by means of explosions as a lot as by means of dialogue, however nonetheless a narrative extra about folks than regimes. Lee, enjoying a grimly managed chief who’s miles away from his shaggy-haired Squid Recreation sad-sack Seong Gi-hun, retains his playing cards near his chest for a lot of the film, however as his choices slender, his desperation and conviction leak out. Jung is an ideal match for him as Kim, a extra unstable character who’s extra prepared to sacrifice his humanity for expediency, however nonetheless pushed by perception.

A part of what makes Hunt work is that it doesn’t fully select between them. This isn’t a easy good-guy/bad-guy story: It’s in regards to the restricted decisions in a fascist regime, for residents and enforcers alike, and in regards to the extremes it drives them to. Each males are rats in the identical entice, on the lookout for each potential path the place they could chew their manner out. It turns them towards one another, but additionally makes them alike in additional methods than they’d need to admit. The outcomes are intense, partaking, and typically laborious to observe, provided that the actual victims listed here are the folks caught within the crossfire. However for followers of motion cinema and espionage drama particularly, Hunt is a must-see. The tone and execution are extremely totally different from Squid Recreation, however it’s simply as a lot a murderous battle for supremacy the place the end result isn’t apparent.

Hunt is enjoying in restricted theatrical launch and is obtainable for streaming rental on Amazon, Vudu, and different digital shops.