Movie Review: ‘Hope’ Is Lost in Endless Action Scenes

Few Hollywood legends hold more enduring power than the ones surrounding the making of Jaws, when a 28-year-old filmmaking prodigy named Steven Spielberg recognized that his production’s mechanical shark was a piece of junk and transformed his shocker about a great white into a masterpiece of suspense about an unseen monster lurking in the deep. Imagine a Jaws where Spielberg never switched gears and instead released a horror film that was almost three hours long and about 50 percent lingering shots of an unconvincing “Bruce” and you begin to understand one of Hope’s central problems.

Its monster is computer generated rather than practical, but once it appears onscreen it sucks all the air out of the theater. And then it appears and appears and appears agan, in an action thriller that unspools for 155 minutes that are somehow both frenetic and sluggish. The heroes spend endless scenes running or driving away from this beast while firing hundreds (maybe thousands!) of bullets at it. They never seem to hurt this creature, and despite the fact that it can run at least 100 miles an hour while splintering trees and shattering buildings, it can never catch up to a guy riding a horse. And so the chases must continue.

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The prolonged first act, which plays like a monster movie crossed with a police procedural, is easily the movie’s best. The local chief Beom-seok (Hwang Jung-min) investigates a mutilated cow discovered on the edge of his remote South Korean town, then sends his cousin Sung-ki (Zo In-sung) to follow the trail of the killer. They suspect it could be a tiger. But when Beom-seok returns to his village, he finds it decimated by an unseen creature that is way too big, way too strong, and way too destructive to be a tiger.

Writer/director Na Hong-jin (The Chaser) follows Beom-seok as he follow the creature’s trail, step by rubble-filled step, through labrynthian streets, alleys, and ruined shops. The debris-filled production design by is so intricate and convincing, even if it occasionally seems like a video game that forgot to include the NPCs; the whole place is abandoned and desolate except for a couple of dead bodies and a handful of amateur monster hunters, who are summarily dispatched by the unseen force.

It takes nearly an hour for Na to tip his hand and unveil the thing that’s wrought all this chaos, and to say this thing does not live up to the wait or our imaginations may be the cinematic understatement of the year. Once this central antagonist is on screen, and once Na introduces his other major hero Sung-ae (Hoyeon) — again, nearly an hour into the film — Hope puts the pedal to the floor for the first of several extremely lengthy shootout and chase scene with this brute, which kills every minor character it encounters with ease but fails in every single attack targeting the plot-armored protagonists even when they are inches apart.

Hope does eventually slow down for a bit before it ramps back up for its even longer and more bombastic final sequence. But the film never uses that quieter second act to develop its characters, or strengthen their relationships, or tease conflicts between the survivors that might pay off later. (Just about the only subplot in the entire film — tension between Beom-seok and a local hunter over their shared culpability in a horrific accident— goes nowhere.) It’s just more procedural drama (and one admittedly funny poop joke).

What little characterization Na provides isn‘t even consistent; Beom-seok begins the film as a bumbling nincompoop; an hour later, he’s suddenly striding through the battlefield like Rambo. By that point, Hope’s fallen back on the repetitive action — some of it very impressively choreographed and shot, save for the presence of the janky creature at its center. (Just you wait until you see who Michael Fassbender and Alicia Vikander play in all of this.)

Then the movie stops. It doesn’t really end; if anything its story seems like it’s just getting started in Hope’s final scenes, as Na introduces a bunch of new concepts that I guess he hopes to explore in a sequel. If any of these surprising developments had been seeded earlier, maybe they could have brought some depth to one of the most one-dimensional action films in recent memory. Instead, they ensure this 2.5-hour story winds down without a satisfying conclusion.

Most of Hope’s CGI is not great, but plenty of good movies have not-great special effects. The problem is less the quality of effects than the quantity; they get used so often and with so little variation: The monster runs at the humans, the humans shoot at the monsters, everyone misses, repeat. Even if it looked fantastic the first time, that would get tiresome by the 200th time — and it did not look fantastic the first time.

RATING: 4/10