2.5/5 stars
Four years after thundered into cinemas to become the most successful Asian film of all time in Hong Kong, Korean writer-director Yeon Sang-ho has returned with Peninsula, the hugely anticipated sequel to his zombie juggernaut.
The film was originally scheduled to open July 15 in Hong Kong, the same day as its South Korea release, but a new round of Covid-19 cases in the city has seen it temporarily shelved. Internationally, the film is likely to creep, virus-like, into markets as they ease lockdown restrictions from the coronavirus pandemic – fitting for a movie set during a deadly, invisible plague.
Gang Dong-won heads an all-new cast as Jung-seok, a marine evacuated to the relative safety of Hong Kong, who is coerced back to retrieve US$20 million in abandoned cash. Promised half of anything recovered, Jung-seok and his brother-in-law Chul-min (Kim Do-yoon) return to an urban wasteland now ravaged by zombies, where pockets of survivors are terrorised by violent militias.
Released in some markets with a “Train to Busan presents” prefix, Peninsula does itself no favours hitching its wagon so prominently to Yeon’s earlier success, which so perfectly balanced apocalyptic horror with sly social commentary.
The 2016 film’s carriage of vividly realised characters is replaced with vaguely sketched archetypes: Lee Jung-hyun’s gun-toting mother-of-two, Kim Min-jae’s snarling mercenary, Koo Kyo-hwan’s slippery kingpin. Instead of fleshed out relationships, characters are now merely related.
Best among the new additions are Lee Re and Lee Ye-won, a pair of gung-ho, pint-sized siblings as adept at offing the undead as any of their adult co-stars. But after a show-stopping introduction in the film’s most memorable sequence, even they are largely ignored.
Yeon advances zombie lore, making his monsters vulnerable to both light and sound, but otherwise Peninsula is less zombie movie than dystopian actioner, borrowing liberally from the franchise to include a Thunderdome-style arena and a climactic car chase featuring a convoy of customised vehicles. However, it is John Carpenter’s Escape from New York that emerges as the film’s most frequent stylistic touchstone.
Where its predecessor was propelled by a breathless immediacy, Peninsula’s prominent action too often feels weightless and cartoonlike, which is ironic considering the grim, realistic tone of Yeon’s earlier animated works.
Hong Kong audiences may be amused that their city is portrayed as populated by Koreans speaking mangled Cantonese. But there is no escaping that Peninsula is a major disappointment.
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