Good News: Tripped from the Headlines

The central incident in Byun Sung-hyun's gorgeously shot Good News is based on a true historic incident: In 1970, the Red Army Faction, a radical communist organization, really did hijack a Japanese plane with the hope of getting to Pyongyang. That's the kind of source material that has unquestionable appeal. It's easy to imagine it turned into a nail-biting thriller like Argo, a sociopolitical satire like Mother Kusters Goes to Heaven or even a weird, revisionist testosterone-fueled comedy like Once Upon a Time in Hollywood. And Byun flirts with each idea, with each direction without every committing to any of them. Because of that, Good News is a series of promises unfulfilled, an ambitious epic people with fascinating characters given half-developed narrative arcs undermined by a major miscaculation on the creator's part: Too much time is spent in the war room deliberating how to deal with this hostage crisis and too little time, on the actual plane.

What a pity. Because on the hijacked 727, Byun has assembled a a film-worthy band of terrorists: an inexperienced leader (Sho Kasumatsu), an unstable second-in-charge (Nairu Yamamoto), even a young boy whose barely out of short pants. They're balanced by a pair of wise-cracking pilots (Kippei Shiina, Kim Sung Oh) supported by a woefully underutilized, in-flight crew. What a movie they would have made! But instead, Byun focuses on the politicians and the negotiators, going so far as to include a preening first lady (Jeon Do-yeon) and a mysterious character named Nobody (Sul Kyung-gu). The hero of Good News turns out to be a lieutenant (Hong Kyung) who comes up with the brilliant idea to reskin a South Korean airport so it looks like North Korea. When that doesn't work as planned, I kind of wondered whether he was the hero after all.