With Hope, there is indeed such a thing as too much awesomeness. A spectacularly exciting and relentless sci-fi action-horror movie that also goes for 30 or 60 minutes longer than it needed to, Hope has a lot to love and an ending that is easy to hate.
Set in a small Korean town near the Northern border, Hope follows both a bumbling police chief and a hunter who quickly discover that a few dead livestock are actually harbingers of a monster invasion from God knows where. As the minutes unfold, writer/director Na Hong-jin (The Wailing) slowly but steadily escalates the story from curious mystery to violent onslaught, where the town’s buildings (let alone its inhabitants) barely slow the rampaging creature down. These first 45 minutes or so are breathtaking, packed with well-staged action, brutal visuals, and incredible set design. Na doesn’t hold back and doesn’t let up.
When the creature is finally revealed, Hope does lose a step; with the off-screen tease lost, the solid-but-not-always-great CGI isn’t entirely convincing. But Na does make the beast formidable and frightening nonetheless.
He could have ended his movie right then and there and most people would agree that Hope was a pretty damn good movie.
But there is still another hour and a half to go.
From there, the story proceeds in unsuspecting though not always satisfying directions, notably with a group of hunters stumbling across the source of the town’s problems. More interesting is the introduction of a creepy young man who has a fetish for female mannequins but who also claims he killed a monster a day earlier. Na also treats us to a whole story about diarrhea that rivals the Christopher Walken pocket watch scene from Pulp Fiction. It’s that good.
Hope reaches incredible highs, but even before the final stretch (more on that soon) the movie isn’t perfect. Early on Hwang Jung-min as Sherriff Beon Seok over-acts every line, shouting belligerently (though he settles down as the film progresses). Na sometimes gets sidetracked by amusing tangents that aren’t always as funny as intended (such as when two characters accidentally shoot a civilian and then debate what to do with him). And tighter editing would have gone a long way, which was a complaint I had about the otherwise sturdy The Wailing.
The climax is where Na really runs into issues, however. The action is nonstop, but truly had this movie ended half an hour earlier (it’s a fast-but-long 2.5 hours) it would have been a better film. As great as the action is, Na just can’t stop himself from throwing one more thing at his characters. And then another. And then another. By the end they’ve “killed” the creature a dozen times over but it keeps coming—it verges on the edge of tedium. Moreso, it’s just unnecessary.
I won’t reveal the film’s final minutes, but let’s just say it’s the most shameless set up for a sequel in quite some time—and yet the final minutes are disastrously bad. Na’s pivot with the creature is confusing, baffling, and downright shoddy; had he not tried to expand his film’s world right at the end and instead focused on delivering a lean, mean monster flick, he may have had a masterpiece on his hands.
Which is what makes Hope so frustrating. And hard to opine about. The ending sucks, the climax is overly long and repetitive, and chunks of the screenplay don’t fully work… and yet large parts of Hope rock in ways that few other recent movies do. It’s worth watching for the highs, but beware of the lows. The diarrhea sequence makes it all worth it, though. I’m not joking.
Review by Erik Samdahl. Erik is a marketing and technology executive by day, avid movie lover by night. He is a member of the Seattle Film Critics Society.