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I'd love to have been on a fly on the wall for the world premiere of Na Hong-jin's Hope at Cannes back in May. The prestigious French film festival doesn't shy away from screening genre films that aren't interested in being intellectually stimulating. In fact, it was just last year that the Australian shark serial killer movie Dangerous Animals debuted there. These films just tend to be screened in the Midnight Screenings sidebar section that has enough proximity from the main attractions to avoid drawing the ire of the people who are only there to watch movies that have higher artistic aspirations. Hope, on the other hand, was competing for the Palme d'or-the festival's top prize which regularly serves as a preview of what films are going to go on to compete for awards around the globe later in the year. An unwieldly action spectacle about the residents (Hwang Jung-min, Zo In-Sung, Ho-yeon, Lee Sang-hee, Im Hyun-sik) of a small South Korean mountainside town near the North Korean border called Hope Harbor banding together to fight a group of mysterious aliens that are already in the process of laying waste to their community when the movie begins being unveiled under these conditions is like somebody showing up to a black-tie event doing Edward 40 Hands. The disgust that came over some attendees upon discovering that a piece of unapologetic low art had somehow snuck into their prestigious party was felt in many of the negative reviews that followed its Cannes premiere, which subsequently helped it go down as one of the most polarizing titles to play at this year's festival. Unsurprisingly, its reception has been a bit better once it broke the containment of the hostile environment it debuted in, but it's still attracted some really harsh criticism from viewers that were expected something more refined from the guy who made The Wailing.
To me, Hope is a leading example of how much the adrenaline of well-executed action and moments of levity can mask serious flaws within a movie. An ending sequel tease so shameless and silly that it could easily be read as a satirical shot at one of the worst trends in modern American movies and some clunky stretches where director Na does his best impression of telling an alien invasion story where the humans decided to do some half-assed sleuthing as to why these extraterrestrials have launched an attack on Earth before they go back to trying to vanquish them are just simply no match for sprawling chase/shootout sequences where it looks like the people performing the stunts could die at any moment and a scene where a side character describes his encounter with the aliens while battling severe diarrhea in the middle of the woods in great detail.
The entire movie is kind of like if you took the cast of a South Korean take on a Coen Brothers movie like Fargo or Raising Arizona and inserted them into a Michael Bay-esque action movie where the main characters reveal themselves to be flying debris, explosions that can be seen from outer space and the biggest fucking guns humanity has ever created. If Cannes had a section dedicated to the joys of seeing bullets penetrate surfaces, perfect slow-motion usage and borderline unkillable aliens that run like cheetahs and have the strength of King Kong, Hope would've won in a landslide. This movie is catnip for anyone who starts shaking with excitement upon hearing that an action movie is chaotic, dumb and messy and I have no qualms with just how hard I ate up the big buffet of dumb maximalist madness that this madman Na hong-Jin put into the world. Thank you director Na for being such an ally to our community and it would be incredible if you were kind enough to feed all of us charlatans another delightful meal someday.
Grade: B+
