Review by
Eric Hillis
Directed by: Yeon Sang-ho
Starring: Gang Dong-won, Lee Jung-hyun, Kwon Hae-hyo, Kim Min-jae, Koo Gyo-hwan, Kim Do-yoon, Lee
Re, Lee Ye-won
The zombie craze that kicked off in the noughties with movies like
28 Days Later, Shaun of the Dead and Zack Snyder's
Dawn of the Dead remake eventually decomposed around a decade
ago after every hack with a digital camera decided they could make their own
zombie movie, turning the genre into the straight-to-VOD equivalent of email
spam. In recent years we've seen this horror sub-genre make something of a
minor comeback with the likes of
Little Monsters, Jim Jarmusch's
The Dead Don't Die
and belated sequel
Zombieland: Double Tap, all of which took a satirical approach to a genre that refuses to die.
The one zombie movie of the last decade that managed to be well received by
both critics and horror fans alike notably played its thrills straight.
South Korean director Yeon Sang-ho's
Train to Busan
won over jaded audiences with the novel idea of setting its zombie outbreak
aboard the titular choo-choo (or should that be chew-chew?). A breakout
international hit, a sequel was inevitable.
Just as the Die Hard franchise became less interesting the
further it moved away from its original confined setting, so too has the
Train to Busan series, but in the space of one sequel. If you
thought Sang-ho's follow-up might play out in a similar setting, like a ship
or a plane, you were mistaken. Instead the zombie ravaged city of Incheon
provides the backdrop for a sequel that's as generic as any of the now
forgotten zombie thrillers that emerged in the late noughties.
Set four years after the events of the first film,
Peninsula introduces us to our handsome but bland hero,
Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won). Once a soldier, Jung-seok now lives as a
refugee in Hong Kong alongside his brother-in-law, Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon), who has never forgiven Jung-seok for seemingly leaving his wife and
child to be munched by zombies during an outbreak on the boat taking them
from Korea to refuge in Hong Kong.
When a local mobster approaches the two men with the offer of a mission to
return to Korea and retrieve an abandoned truck loaded with 20 million US
dollars in cash, Jung-seok and Chul-min accept. Returning to their native
land, they find their mission threatened not so much by zombies, but by the
violent criminal gang that now runs the decimated metropolis.
The chief influence on Peninsula would appear to be John
Carpenter's Escape from New York, but it boasts none of the quirky characters that made that movie such a
cult fave. Instead we get a bunch of cardboard goodies and baddies with no
discernible personalities beyond varying degrees of nobility and
lawlessness. Jung-seok is such a dull protagonist that it's impossible to
care whether he finds redemption - he's not so much The Man With No Name as
The Man With No Personality. Only Yu-jin (Lee Ye-won), a
five-year-old who plays her part by distracting zombies with a selection of
remote-controlled toy cars, stands out as a memorable character.
The action set-pieces are equally forgettable, too often employing
second-rate CG that creates the appearance of Playstation 2 era video game
cut scenes, with a discernible weightlessness to the visuals. The hordes of
zombies never quite feel like a threat to our heroes, so easily dismissed
and distracted are they, and the human villains are equally ineffective
despite their ruthlessness. Sang-ho is working with a much bigger canvas
here, but he's lost the creativity required by the confined setting of
Peninsula's predecessor. This sequel is destined to take its place in the shambling
horde of zombie movies cynically made to cash-in on a better example of the
genre's success.
