Hunt: Sadistic Spy Games

I miss the days when gunshots were few and far between in South Korean action pics. I also have a hard time with movies that involve interogations using torture because the violence seems so pointless since people often confess to whatever the accusation is when under extreme physical duress. Which brings me to Hunt, the weapon-heavy, gratuitously battering directorial debut of Squid Games actor Lee Jung-jae. In this spy pic about an attempted presidential assassination, the bullets fly with some regularity but the more effective conflicts are strictly mano a mano...like when two opposing police-like factions meet in a hospital hallway and one of the leaders shouts out "Push through!" Mob meet mob.

As for the two men helming these two rival groups, one heads the foreign arm of the South Korean Agency for National Security Planning; the other, the national branch. Both men are deeply corrupt. (Is it just me or would lead actors Lee Jung-jae and Jung Woo-sung make an sensational pairing for a Korean version of Sam Shepard's True West?) That one of them is fighting for peaceful reconciliation between the two Koreas is ludicrous to the extreme. Hat tips to Jeon Hye-jin as a persistent third-in-command, Jeong Man-sik as an eventually-comatose agent, and Hwang Jung-min as a North Korean defector with sass because even overlong movies that don't quite work can come with fine performances.