Before you start chanting “Green light, red light” inspired by Lee Jung-jae's most sucessfull screen appearance, bear in mind that his directorial debut “Hunt” has so many traffic lights to deal with, that you won't have time to spell ‘green' until the end. In this vertigo pacing political thriller, there are so many things happening that it is a true challenge to follow the plot. Lee's thriller bag is full of explosions, double crossing, torture and sub-plots making one's mind foggy, and despite of being thankful for plenty of action, you will wish there was a manual to adapt your simpleton expectations of a thriller to it. If there is a bit of a relief that at least some information about the political setting is given in the title cards, other elements are left to be put in their right order. Except that there are simply too many of them. With barely any time to settle in the story, you are left to speed through a twist after twist, without time to properly breathe in and out. “Hunt” is a twister that ravages through the spectator's mind.
“Hunt” screened at Cannes Film Festival
This is a film that has been polarizing film critics since its first screening in Cannes Film Festival's Midnight Section. Some praise it for its lavishly produced overload of mayhem and fantastically orchestrated action scenes, while others criticize its lack of coherence. And although there are big hickups in the storyline which suffers from overload, the lack of coherence gets compensated for, through the excessive use of well-functioning distractors such as rivalry, a deceiving female, bombs going off (although they miraculously destroy every brick, but are not doing the great job at killing), stomach-turning torture, car chase… Some of those moments are done with such an elegance, that logic becomes secondary in the process. Others are executed with an exaggerated enthusiasm, particularly towards the end, potentially causing pain in abdominal muscles.
The story is set against the backdrop of Korea's turbulent political times, four years after the assasination of President Park Chung-hee that, on one hand, ended his 16-year long dictatorship (1983), but on the other, set another kind of political turbulences to motion. The film kicks off in Washington DC, with the first assassination attempt at the new (fictive) Korean president during his official state visit, which ignites the rivalry between the leader of the Korean Central Intelligence Agency's Foreign Unit Park Pyong-ho (Lee Jung-jae) and the domestic unit chief Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung).
One of the most incomprehensible things in the movie is the nature of the two lead characters' friendship. One moment they are best friends, although Kim was involved in a torturous interrogation of Park right after the switch in power, and the next – they are rivals again, each believing that the other one is a North Korean spy who operates under the code name “Donglin”. It gets even more complicated when it turns out that one of them is Donglin after all, but this twist would be too simple of a solution for Lee's thriller. Therefore – we've got another twist.
Another interesting dilemma regards the likeability of the film's leads. Park might have a bit of morality in his body, particularly when he starts questioning not only the agency's methods, but also his own, and he also isn't a typical hero who saves the day. At the same time, in this way, the face of the ‘spying business' is shown in its proper ugliness, and so are the mechanisms of power supported by its servants. All means are allowed to keep the governments continue their way of doing things.
“Hunt” could have profitted from a more gentle editing, and from less of the staccato pace which drains the energy from your body along its 131 minutes of runtime. Nevertheless, considering Lee Jung-jae's popularity and the fact that the film premiered in Cannes, this is the title that will most likely reach a wide international audience.
