Hunt: A Confusion of Spies
By Liam Lacey
Rating: C+
The Korean actor Lee Jung-jae became internationally known as the protagonist of 2021’s hit survival drama Squid Game, the most watched series in Netflix history. Now he’s directed his own movie, Hunt, about a different kind of competition for survival set during the South Korea’s dictatorship.
The plot is a John LeCarré-style story that reflects historical events through rivalry between two officers in the Korean Central Intelligence Agency (KCIA). As well as directing, Lee co-stars here as Park Pyong-ho, the KCIA’s foreign unit chief of the agency, who finds himself in a power struggle with the head of the domestic unit, Kim Jung-do (Jung Woo-sung) as the agency tries to discover a North Korean mole in the organization.
The year is 1983, a period of authoritarian rule and turmoil. Ronald Reagan has upped the anti-Communist rhetoric and tensions have increased with North Korea. Paranoia is rampant. The last president (this is historically true) was assassinated by the head of the KCIA. The perceived enemies of the government are both North Koreans and anyone sympathetic to the democracy movement, which led to the violently supressed 1980 Gwangju uprising.
Even understanding some South Korean history is unlikely to iron out all the wrinkles in this convoluted plot. Between the exposition drops, flashbacks and twists, it’s also an action film, full of slickly executed car chases, shoot outs, hand-to-hand combat sequences.
The story, and action, kick off in Washington D.C. during a state visit, where Park (foreign service) and Kim (domestic) are forced to take down snipers. Park, an intelligence veteran, is briefly taken hostage but kills the sniper, which puts him on the wrong side of Kim, newly recruited from the army, who wanted the man taken alive.
They both must confront the knowledge that someone knew the president’s itinerary in advance, which means there’s a leak in the intelligence service.
From there, the two men encounter a string of crises that could fill a season of a television series such as 24. A North Korean scientist in Japan wants to defect; to prove his bona fides, he warns that the North Koreans know about a South Korean secret ops mission to steal nuclear intel. The mission isn’t called off in time and the special ops team is wiped out. Then the defection goes grotesquely wrong, when different factions of the KCIA are working under different orders.
Along the way, we learn that Park has a mysterious parental relationship with a young woman student, Yoo-jung (Go Yoon-jung), and helps spring her from jail when she’s accidentally arrested with a group of student protestors. Kim, who begins interrogating all the foreign intelligence agents, begins doing a background check on the young woman.
In turn, Park is also suspicious about Kim’s ties to an arms manufacturing company, known to dispense bribe money. A new KCIA head, from the military, pits the two men against each other, encouraging them to up to violence of the interrogations.
The movie’s habit of hopscotching from crisis to crisis is exemplified by the sudden news that a North Korean fighter plane has just entered South Korean space. The plane, it turns out, is being flown by a would-be defector, willing to buy asylum in exchange for the key to a North Korean military code, which reveals information about North Korean agents working in the south.
That helps lead Park’s super-competent deputy, a middle-aged woman (Jeon Hye-Jin) with a genius for data analysis, to a startling discovery. Of course, the CIA is also involved, pulling international strings from Washington.
Inevitably, the rivals see some common aims from their different perspectives. The action culminates at a Korean Japanese summit in Thailand where the guns blaze and explosions boom. Without having spent enough time to establish the background of the characters and their conflicted motives, Hunt leaves us bystanders to the mayhem.
Hunt. Directed by Lee Jung-jae. Written by Lee Jung-jae and Jo Seung-Hee. Starring Lee Jung-jae, Jung Woo-sung, Go Yoon-jung and Jeon Hye-Jin. Available December 2 in Toronto (TIFF Bell Lightbox and digital TIFF Bell Lightbox), Vancouver (Vancity) and Ottawa (Mayfair).