It’s not often that a film really mint fresh horror of an exhausting tropical. Yet with his exciting ride of 2016 Train to Busan, South Korean writer-director Yeon Sang-ho increased the moribund walk-death genre with striking imagery, a cramped attitude, and some blood-spattered insights into how people develop during crisis. What’s more, he did so without really figuring it out: Although we saw many zombie movies in search of accusing human morality, some agreed with Yeon’s heart and intelligence, which drove was greeted by a whole passenger car worthy with busy characters and the strong charm of the actors bringing them to life.
Next to the sea of formidable undead and at least one businessman in the neck, Train to BusanThe biggest, now all-too-well-known source of distress was the uncertainty of a rapidly spreading epidemic. Train to Busan Presents: Peninsula makes no attempt to replicate that market of fears, as it leaps four years into the no-pandemic. Unfortunately, the film does not find a terrible replacement for it either. Yeon, who returns in direct and with-write this sequel, instead relying heavily on CGI and an inexplicable heist plot – plenty of entertaining qualities that, however, do not compensate for the film’s failures, including a thin starting point, for the most part forgettable characters (none of the latter film returns in this standalone sequel), and a lack of emotional heft made it so refreshingly original.
PeninsulaThe prologue supports public back to the beginning of the epidemic. Soldier Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won) escorts his sister and her young son to a ferry that runs to the nearest safe harbor, Japan. It takes a little while before the sister is foreseen eaten – and her child is also killed – by an infected passenger; Jung-seok and his sister-in-law, Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon), barely escape the closet. When we meet the couple again in a hub for a survivor in Hong Kong, years have passed, and the military man is a gloomy shell of his former self, burdened by guilt of survival. Any belief that a viewer might have that he will rediscover his zeal for life – or anything that looks more alive to him than the zombies on his tail – would be badly misplaced. This is who the man is now, and it’s boring.
Yet Jung-seok must haven some will have to survive because he and Chul-min agree to help a suspected American who is looking for an abandoned truck full of millions of dollars, which he promises to share with whomever successfully recovers the money from zombie-infested Incheon. The two men, whose relationship has since grown, work together with two other Korean refugees and travel to a city that has become a death trap. Unfortunately for her, Yeon expands the mission with conquered obstacles. There is, for example, the scene where one member of the team makes the astonishing decision to lie over a demonstrably lifeless corpse within the tight confines of a car, only to discover that, sure enough, the body is not really lifeless. and soon attracted some similarly insecure company. It’s a small detail that betrays PeninsulaThe clumsy supports in building tension, all much less clever than the originals.
Jung-seok crawls out of that predicate, but the rest of his journey is barely recent; it follows a highly customized approach to wilderness, including the introduction of a Mad Max-ian militia, a gladiatorial battle arena (with zombies, of course), and a fearless mother (Lee Jung-Hyun) whose clutter family helps our hero with the lost desert navigate. Peninsula marches to its unremarkable end fairly slowly – especially for a movie with hordes of sprinting ghou!
Yeon keeps his eye on visually appealing moments, like one bathing Tetris with zombies in silvery moonlight. And the car chases – some shots from wheel level – provide much-needed, intermittent zips of excitement. But while the first Train to Busan was an offensive, character-driven story of sorrow and redemption, Peninsula flounders in generic spectacle. Even fans may wonder if there are still bones left to choose from on this franchise.
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