Peninsula: Sequel to the South Korean zombie hit Train to Busan gives you more of everything, except originality
By Liam Lacey
Rating: B minus
South Korean director Yeon Sang-Ho’s 2016 hit, Train to Busan, found a new track for the zombie genre, placing the action and horror within the confines of a high-speed train.
Centered around a middle-class divorced dad and his daughter en route from Seoul to Busan, and a passenger list comprising a microcosm of Korean social types, Busan was a concentrated package. A character-driven action movie with on-the-nose political commentary, along with hordes of spastic scrambling zombies, it was a blockbuster smash in Asian markets and a cult favourite elsewhere.
Some people can’t get enough of a zombie apocalypse.
Now comes the sequel, Peninsula, set four years after the first film, at a point when the entire Korean peninsula has been over-run by zombies and isolated from contact with surrounding countries.
Selected for the 2020 Cannes Film Festival, and already a box-office success in South Korea, Peninsula gives us more – a bigger budget, locations, more set-piece chases and nimble camera-work (from Lee Hyung-deok) – but less originality. There’s a blast of Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome here, a spasm of World War Z there, and the gloom of Escape from New York everywhere.
The human story follows a group of four survivors, led by former army captain, Jung-seok (Gang Dong-won), who are living as despised refugees in Hong Kong when a rich American gives them a chance to get rich. He’ll pay them go back into the infected zone for half of a $20-million haul in US cash, hiding in a truck.
The mission is presented as risky but feasible: A single night, in and out, using night-vision glasses because the zombies are virtually blind.
As the four arrive by skiff to the ruined coastal city of Incheon, they discover the real enemy is not the undead hordes, but a brutal new civilization of survivors, run by grifters and mercenary paramilitary units, who force refugees into zombie-fighting arena games.
A subsidiary plot, for sentimental interest, involves Jung-Seok’s interaction with a family of survivors, including a plucky single mom, her two sassy street-wise daughters and an elderly soldier.
Relentlessly episodic and missing the taut focus of the first film, Peninsula compensates with overkill, populating the screen with long-stretches of CGI action (Yeon’s background is in animation) including nighttime car chases and oodles of zombie splatter. By their premise, zombie movies are studies of persistence but sometimes you just wish they knew when to quit.
Peninsula. Directed by Yeon Sang-ho. Written by Yeon Sang-ho and Ryu Yongjae. Starring: Gang Dong-won, Kim Do-yoon, Lee Jung-hyun, Kown Hae-hyo, Lee Ra, Lee ye-won, Koo Gyo-hwan, Kim Min-jae. Peninsula is available from Aug. 7 in theatres including IMAX, ScreenX and 4D, including Cineplex Yonge-Dundas, Scotiabank, Cineplex Yonge-Eglinton and Silvercity Yorkdale.